2023 Nissan Pathfinder Safety and Reliability

The NHTSA has had the opportunity to do a partial review the 2022 Nissan Pathfinder and awarded the 2WD model four stars for the frontal crash and five stars for the side crash. The AWD was subjected to the rollover test, in which it netted four stars. No overall result has been issued yet. The IIHS has conducted a full test, awarding it best possible scores of Good in most crash tests and rating the crash-prevention systems highly. These results were sufficient to bag it a 2022 Top Safety Pick+ award.

You can drive the Pathfinder knowing that it's equipped with several active and passive features that will do the most to keep your family out of harm's way. It has ten airbags (11 on Platinum) including rear-seat side airbags and dual front knee airbags, a rearview camera (surround-view on upper trims), LATCH anchors for the second row, and the usual list of safety acronyms designed to keep you going straight and true.

On the driver-assistance side, even the base model gets the most important features. These include blind-spot warning, rear cross-traffic alert, automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, rear parking sensors, rear automatic braking, intelligent forward-collision warning, driver-alertness monitoring, and lane-departure warning. From SV upwards the blind-spot monitoring and lane-keep assist come with an intervention feature.

The base S is the only model with basic cruise control. SV models are equipped with the semi-autonomous ProPilot adaptive cruise control and steering assist, while the SL and Platinum add real-time Navi-Link navigation to the ProPilot system. The SL also gets an auto-dimming rearview mirror with a HomeLink transceiver, front parking sensors, traffic-sign recognition, and a surround-view camera. On top of that, the Platinum adds a head-up display, rain-sensing wipers, and side mirrors with an automatic reverse tilt-down function.

The Nissan Pathfinder is still very new and it was subject to five recalls in 2022, its first year on the market. These were for third-row headrests that could detach, second-row seatback welds that could separate, the potential failure of the secondary hood latch, missing second-row seat-track bolts, and an inoperative backup camera. We expect a few teething issues for an all-new model, and importantly, most of the mechanical bits were carried over from the previous Pathfinder, so we're hopeful it'll be reliable where it counts. It seems to be getting better, as the 2023 models wasn't subject to any recalls yet at the time of writing.

The Pathfinder is covered by a three-year/36,000-mile limited warranty and a five-year/60,000-mile powertrain warranty.