Toyota didn't do Nissan any favors. Its tenuous steps into the full-size-pickup segment, first with the T100 and then with the 7/8-scale Tundra, muddied the waters for American consumers, who became thoroughly schooled in the notion that Japanese trucks simply didn't measure up. Nissan's full-size truck would have to make a very strong statement if it were to reeducate people whose vision of a pickup focused squarely on the Ford F-150. Nissan's U.S. dealers, embarrassed by the utter wussiness of the last-generation Frontier truck, told Nissan's new chief, Carlos Ghosn, not even to think about bringing another truck to our market without a V-8 engine. Nissan's U.S.-based product planners, engineers, designers, and executives made similar pleas to Japan: If we're going to do a truck bigger than the Frontier, it has to be a real pickup.
And so, the Titan that made its public debut at the January 2003 Detroit auto show and went on sale that fall was a pickup truck writ large. You might think that the Titan's designers were on loan from Tonka Toys, as they almost went overboard making the Titan at least as big, bold, and butch as anything from Detroit this side of a Cummins-powered dualie.... Read full article