The Nissan Terrano plug-in hybrid (PHEV) SUV is at the top of a “prioritised lineup” of potential future models as Nissan Australia’s new managing director looks to reverse the Japanese brand’s local sales slide.
A new Terrano was shown at the Auto China 2026 motor show in Beijing last month, and Nissan’s new Australian and Oceania boss Steve Millette has declared it one of the brand’s “priority models” for this market.
“The Terrano [is a] fantastic… [ladder] frame SUV. I mean, we saw it live [at Auto China] – it’s bad-ass. It’s a beautiful, beautiful product, and so you know these are all the kinds of business cases that we are evaluating for our market,” he said.
Mr Millette was speaking only weeks after taking over the top job for Nissan locally, having replaced Andrew Humberstone on April 1, 2026.
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His near-decade-long tenure at Nissan includes five years as the chief of Nissan Canada, a market in which 1.9 million new vehicles are sold annually compared to Australia’s 1.2 million.
Yet Canada, Mr Millette explained, has only around 32 auto brands, while Australian new-car buyers – despite there being fewer of them – now have around 75 brands to choose from.
“As a company, if you want to have a solid footing [in Australia], mid-size utility [Navara], you need to be a big player… when you get to Y62 [Patrol] and Y63 [new Patrol] space, it’s not as big a segment, but it tends to be a lucrative segment, and so it’s one that you need to pay attention to.”
Yet there are still gaps in the Nissan Australia lineup which need to be filled.
“You saw the Terrano concept vehicle. To me that would be something we seriously need to look at, and there would be demand for that at this point.”
The Terrano name – not seen in Australia since the Terrano II was last updated in 1999 – was applied to the Beijing concept, which featured a rugged design inside and out.
While its underpinnings were not confirmed at the show, Mr Millette’s “frame SUV” reference suggests it’s based on a ladder-frame chassis preferred by off-road vehicle buyers.
Nissan announced the Terrano would be in Chinese showrooms before April 2027, meaning an Australian arrival would likely follow later that year – or potentially in 2028.
It would sit below the Patrol in the Nissan lineup in terms of size and price, while offering a more off-road-focused alternative to the X-Trail mid-size SUV, currently Nissan’s best-selling model in Australia.
Nissan has said the new Terrano is a “China-first” model, hence its Beijing unveiling, suggesting it will be exported globally from China.
This could make it the second new Nissan model sourced from China, with the Nissan Frontier Pro dual-cab PHEV ute – developed with partner Dongfeng as a rival for the popular BYD Shark 6 – previously earmarked by Nissan Australia’s former boss for local showrooms.
The company’s new managing director hasn’t ruled out the Frontier Pro, which was confirmed for local release to Nissan Australia retailers at an Adelaide dealer event last year but is yet to be publicly announced by Nissan for this market.
“You would have seen the Frontier Pro or Navara Pro – whatever it’s going to be called in the future – but these are all the products that we’re looking at,” he said.
Beyond this, Mr Millette said there would not be major changes to Nissan’s local lineup, suggesting weak sales were not solely due to a lack of models.
“I would say the portfolio that you know is the portfolio that we have,” he said.
Nissan Australia posted a 32.2 per cent year-on-year sales slump across the first four months of 2026, nearly double the 16.5 per cent decline recorded over the same period in 2025.
Its full-year Australian sales in 2025 fell 21.6 per cent after the brand recorded 15.0 per cent growth the previous year.
April 2026 alone saw a 35.6 per cent sales decline, while brands including Honda, Hyundai and BYD posted gains.
“It wasn’t a surprise,” the new Nissan boss told CarExpert.
“I think on a year-over-year basis, you got product portfolio changes, you’ve got introductions of new models… I’ll use the Qashqai [small SUV] as an example. It would have been one of those vehicles that’s way down, but we have no stock, or we have very little stock.
“So there’s a rebalancing of some of the inventories of the new models. If you take Navara as an example, you had D23 that was plenty, and it was quite available, and it focused on a price point, right?
“It was a great product, but it also had one of its selling benefits was the price point. Now you’re launching the new one, and not everybody had all the trims across the country, you know.
“We made sure from a quality perspective everything was up to spec before we actually shipped them to the dealers. So I think April [2026]… it was known that it would be that kind of year-over-year performance.”