It's a curse of the modern family and it goes something like this: the first-born in virtually any family gets all the brains and, accordingly, most of the responsibility. The last-born, generally known as the baby, gets the good looks and most of the attention. And anyone born in between usually has to work twice as hard as any of their siblings - not always with much credit along the way.
As it happens, the same applies to the great automotive families. For every Toyota LandCruiser that can boast about being the first-born in the Toyota dynasty and every market-leading RAV4 "baby", there's also a Prado or Kluger that can grizzle about being the "middle one". Same goes for Nissan - whose range is constructed almost entirely of SUVs, with the legendary Patrol at the top of the family tree and any number of similarly-sized, designed and specified baby soft roaders such as the Juke, Qashquai and X-Trail.
And in the middle? The Nissan Pathfinder. Reliable, practical and comfortable - but the typical "middle child": capable, willing and reliable. Not convinced? Consider this.
The Pathfinder has been a staple on the Australian market since 1986, trailing only a handful of long-serving models on the Aussie market that can almost match the Cruiser or the Patrol for the title of longest-serving 4WD still in production. So you'd think the Pathfinder would get almost the same warm glow as its siblings? Hardly. More than three decades have had a very positive effect on the Pathfinder - .