Musical Frontiers? After the debut yesterday of the all-new global-market NP300 Navara pickup, multiple stories about the future of our Frontier—which wears the Navara nameplate elsewhere—began to swirl. We believe we’ve gotten to the bottom of things, or at least as well as we can for a product that’s still two to three years out.
That was the time frame we were given for seeing some version of the new Navara—or at least a truck using its major constituent pieces—on our shores. Today, a report from The Truth About Cars says Nissan may in fact be turning back the clock and developing the next North American Frontier off an updated version of the two-generations-old D22 platform, which was last sold within our borders from 1997 until 2004. (A D22-based Nissan pickup is still sold in Mexico and other world markets.)
Citing a source at an unnamed supplier, the report claims that Nissan is trying to engineer the old D22 technology to pass crash and emissions tests “with flying colors.” The report goes on to state that ditching the current model’s F-Alpha platform in favor of the D22 would save hundreds of pounds of weight and reduce development costs, although, according to the supplier, they’re not having an easy time modernizing the architecture for crash compliance. We can’t imagine why.
We find—as do our own sources close to Nissan with whom we spoke today—this scenario to be extremely unlikely. Unless Nissan plans to introduce a Frontier and a Frontier Lite, it contradicts what we were told by a Nissan spokesman yesterday, which was that the new Navara will serve as the basis for the next Frontier, but that our truck wouldn’t appear for a handful of years. Indeed, the next Frontier might not come to America until the NP300 Navara is due for its first face lift.
- Future Frontier: Nissan Unveils NP300 Navara Pickup for Global Markets
- Nissan Frontier Diesel Runner Cummins Concept: YES, PLEASE
- Nissan Frontier Reviews, Pricing, News, Photos, and More
Further, it’s unlikely a truck sitting on a smaller, outdated platform—even if successfully updated for emissions and safety—would stand a chance against the new, feature-laden Chevy Colorado/GMC Canyon and the next-generation Toyota Tacoma, which could appear in the meantime. Such a Frontier would need to be priced far, far below the competition, lest it find itself DOA outside of, perhaps, a small core of grizzled, back-to-basics buyers. (Of course, those sorts of folks don’t purchase all that many new vehicles.) To us—and to our sources—it just doesn’t add up.
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