If daily fluctuations in global security are making you not quite feel like thinking about a new car at this moment — or even filling up — I feel your pain. Even this year’s marginally truncated 2026 version of the Colorado Auto Show, running through Sunday night, April 12, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, came up entirely blank on media events, so I had to be a little more creative to get out of the doldrums.

Instead, I spent much of last weekend in Los Angeles, the car capital of the United States, witnessing diesel prices push past $8 a gallon and well, of course driving vehicles, including a super-exotic we’ll discuss in a few weeks here.

I can detail a mega-urban outing in the 2026 Platinum Reserve version of the Nissan Armada, the fuller-than-full-sized, three-row behemoth that quite seriously gives its Infiniti QX80 cousin a run for the money.

So large that I dubbed it a one-car high-occupancy-vehicle lane, the revised Armada can indeed be ordered in versions considerably less expensive than QX80 (a base version starts at $58,840, versus the Infiniti’s $83,750). But the substantially up-glossed Platinum Reserve I drove was $89,000, which also included two-tone Super Premium paint and the ProPilot Assist 2.1 package.

The paint job was probably this vehicle’s most splashy attribute, with a glowing pearl-white body offset with a glossy black roof and window pillars, making it look like the world’s largest Range Rover. The Range Rovers, as plentiful in Southern California as Tacomas and 4Runners are here, were all done up in dirty-matte wrap jobs, all looking a bit louche.

My Nissan instead looked like money, felt like a wall of vehicle, and did a wonderful job of holding its own among 18 million other drivers. Its stance, somewhere between a 1970s dental building and the older Nissan NV3500 cargo van, was only outclassed by a couple of non-commercial vehicles, those including a Chevy Tahoe High Country on custom wheels I parked next to in Rancho Palos Verdes. Small it is not, in any way — 209.6 inches long and 83.3 inches wide, riding on oversized 22-inch alloy wheels.

The Infiniti-esque upgrades here include quilted leather seats in all three rows and leather over most of the vehicle’s surfaces, with its own two-tone look that features animal hide-look inserts on the mid-dash and the Harley fender-sized console box cover.

Apparently Baby Yoda (or a real human about three feet tall) had been driving the car before me as the driver’s memory seat repeatedly automatically tried to crush me every time I clambered aboard.

I had fewer total electronics issues as I have had with both QX80 and Armada, though my feeling is that Google-based operating systems at their very core really don’t like having to connect with Apple phones (I find this in General Motors vehicles too) as part of the very bright 14.3-inch digital display. 

A tangible win for Armada is the inclusion of an aesthetically challenged but helpful stack of physical controls, including big silver flappy tabs for temps and fan speed, a particularly ungainly eight-setting drive mode knob and that ofttimes bewildering horizontal strip of push-button controls for the transmission. At least nothing’s hidden, or a mystery.

I did feel it prudent to disable some of the behemoth Armada’s more intrusive systems, including a lane-keep feature that buzzes like the rumble pack on late-1990s Nintendo 64. Likewise, I suppose this would have been an ideal time to check out the evolving semi-self-driving functionalities of ProPilot 2.1, especially as I did an all-freeways route from the 110 to the 91 to the 5 to the 55. But my first few days were spent literally dodging driverless Waymo Jaguars and autonomous pizza-delivery robots in Santa Monica, so I kept my hands firmly clenched around the wheel, at all times. 

Power from the 425-hp 3.5-liter twin-turbo V6, as I felt in the past, is going to feel more than adequate (especially at sea level), especially if you haven’t driven the more powerful QX80 and you didn’t bother reading about the Madman Theory 460-hp engine in the Armada NISMO edition.

It’s not quite drag-racing material, but it was also more than capable of exceeding the 19 mpg highway rating.