Watch: Behind the scenes of Premcar's Nissan Navara PRO-4X Warrior

UPDATE, August 25: Premcar has elaborated on the Navara Pro 4-X Warrior’s design process, revealing it conducted three months of testing in Victoria’s Big Desert Wilderness Park alongside work at the Australian Automotive Research Centre (AARC).

A team of six Premcar engineers and technicians spent up to three weeks at a time putting the pre-production vehicle through rigorous on and off-road work near the South Australian border.“Big Desert was perfect”, said Premcar engineering director Bernie Quinn. “It’s got a lot of different terrain, smooth gravel roads for high-speed testing, really rutted, muddy tracks, sand dunes and sand tracks, and deep corrugations.“Basically everything Australia can throw at you off-roading, it’s got. And then it’s a quick drive to get back onto bitumen roads to validate the changes we made.”

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August 5: Taking vehicles to their limits has always been a staple of Premcar's operations – and its latest project, the Nissan Navara PRO-4X Warrior, is no different.

Set to be launched through Nissan dealers from September 1, the Navara PRO-4X Warrior by Premcar has been designed as the marque's ultimate off-roader – creating a halo model to rival offerings such as the Toyota HiLux Rugged X and Ford Ranger Raptor.

The PRO-4X Warrior has been seriously fettled by the Epping-based team, with Premcar not willing to sacrifice comfort and capability given it is slated to be produced alongside the standard Navara's lifecycle – not as a limited-run special as was the case with the N-TREK Warrior.

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Billed as the world's toughest Navara, Premcar's head of programs, Tom Imbesi, said the PRO-4X Warrior's strengths come from its local development.

"We’ve made it [the PRO-4X] even better," said Imbesi.

"We undertook durability testing, thermal testing, NVH testing, as well as all the component testing. And we conducted a lot of it at the Australian Automotive Research Centre, and it has some of the toughest off-road tracks."

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"Australians love utes, but more importantly they love to modify utes – Nissan didn't have a product which fitted that niche," added Matt Baily, Nissan’s senior manager of local product development and enhancement.

“From a customer’s perspective, to know it’s been locally developed, locally designed, locally tested and locally manufactured is extremely important."

Set to arrive in showrooms next month, the PRO-4X Warrior arrives with a price tag of $67,490 in six-speed manual guise, while the seven-speed automatic incurs a $2500 premium – bumping its cost up to $69,990.