Left to my own devices, and without prior experience behind the wheel, I'm sure I would not have picked a Nissan X-Trail as my ideal vehicle for a trip which involved covering more than 1200 miles of motorway plus several hours of inner-city crawling within three days.Firstly, this is not the kind of thing a lifestyle off-roader is meant to be good at; and secondly, if the desperately out-of-date Terrano II was anything to go by, a Nissan lifestyle off-roader in particular ought to be avoided if at all possible.Still, you have to play the hand you're dealt. The need to travel to a far-off metropolis arose at the same time as I was living with the X-Trail. End of story. And do you know, I could hardly have picked a better travelling companion myself.Its name suggests a vehicle which can stride boldly across ground previously visited only by the occasional llama, but this is not what the car is all about. Although it feels like it would make a reasonable job of rough-terrain driving, the X-Trail's design brief was biased towards performance on tarmac. This is almost universally the case these days, since off-roaders famously spend almost none of their time off-road. Still, it's a difficult compromise to make, and Nissan has done it expertly.The test car, in top-of-the-range SE+ specification, used the 2.2-litre turbo diesel engine and the long-striding six-speed manual gearbox. Along with supportive seats and a roomy interior, these allow for hours of quiet, relaxed, comfortable motorway cruising. Far more so, in fact, than you would expect from a car fitted with this particular engine, which apart from a radical and obviously extremely effective rethink of the fuel system is exactly the same as the one which made such an appalling racket in the Almera hatchback we tested some time ago.It's by no means the strongest engine of its type on the market, and on paper the performance isn't all that impressive. But 0-62mph figures, for example, can be quite irrelevant to the way a car behaves in the real world, and in-gear acceleration is more than adequate. There's also enough torque to pull that high sixth gear without any trouble, and also to let you overtake easily and safely.The suspension has been very well thought out, too. Barring an occasional uncertainty in cross winds (an almost unavoidable consequence of the car's height), the X-Trail was very stable in a straight line. In quite different driving conditions, it also proved capable of being hustled enthusiastically along more challenging roads, thanks to a combination of softness and good damping which is shared by most of the cars I particularly enjoy driving.This is the time to mention the Electronic Stability Programme (ESP+) which links the 4x4 system, ABS, traction control and active brake limited slip differential to sort things out in tricky situations. Nissan makes quite a big deal of this, and understandably so, but the handling is so good that I'm sure tricky situations are unlikely to arise very often, unless the driver does something particularly stupid.There's room for a lot of luggage, which can be covered as necessary. The only slight problem with this is that the independently reclining rear seats require two smaller extra covers to take into account possible differences of intrusion into the luggage space. Dealing with the three covers can be a fiddly business, though I didn't help matters by trying to undo them while kneeling on one of the back seats (an amused bystander asked why I didn't just tip the seat forward, which I would have done if I'd realised it was possible.)The small list of options includes rear parking sensors for £310 and Nissan's own Birdview navigation system for £1500. The test car did not have the former, which turned out to be something of a pity (no scrape marks, though), but did have the latter. Sorry, but it's not worth the extra money. For a start, the screen lighting is set up the wrong way round, so that it's too dim in daytime but too bright at night. This makes it effectively unusable after dusk, and the only way of using it safely during the day is to switch on the sidelights.But that's not the worst of it. The tracking system isn't very good at keeping up with the car, which can cause problems even when you're going through town. At motorway speeds the situation can become ridiculous, such as when I went sailing past an exit which the computer insisted was a quarter of a mile away. (I know this doesn't read very convincingly, but I didn't know the road - which was why I was using the damned system in the first place - and I'd assumed the exit I drove past was one of a closely-spaced pair.)Even that was a mere frippery compared with Birdview's bizarre attempt to lead me through a strange city by the most convoluted route imaginable. Not knowing the area myself, I had to believe what I was being told, and continued to wend my way through narrow side streets until I turned into one which had been permanently blocked off to through traffic.Unlike some rival satnavs, Birdview does not suggest ways of rejoining the "correct" (ha!) route if you are forced to deviate from it, so I had to wander around for a bit before re-setting my destination. About ten minutes later, not in the sunniest of moods, I was advised to turn right on to a dual-carriageway, a manoeuvre which would have involved clambering over the central reservation. It was at this point that I decided once and for all that Birdview is for the birds, and it would be just peachy if Nissan either got the system working properly or bought in someone else's.Until either of these things happen, I'd give the satnav a miss and spend a minute fraction of the money saved on a good map. And then I'd enjoy living with what might just be the best car of its type on the market.Second opinion: Am I glad I drove the X-Trail on home ground! Satnav apart, this is certainly a first-rate 4x4 for tarmac motoring, especially if that includes occasional bouts of bad-weather driving and towing. It's always worth bearing in mind that, although this is a chunky-looking off-roader, its electronic four-wheel drive system has features borrowed from the high-performance Skyline GT-R. The X-Trail feels robustly built and well planned, but I wonder what dwarf designed the radio controls. Thank goodness Nissan has now gone for common rail. Its current turbo diesels are vast improvements on their rackety predecessors. Yes, the combination of a good diesel engine, a high sixth gear, comfortable seats and a sufficiently supple ride quality does make this an unexpectedly good long-distance cruiser. 47mpg extra urban fuel consumption figure is worth a few Brownie points too. Ross Finlay. Engine 2184cc, 4 cylinders Power 111bhp Transmission 6-speed manual Fuel/CO2 39.2mpg / 190g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 13.7 seconds Top speed 103mph Price £20,895 Details correct at publication date