2004 Nissan Titan in Pacoima

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. Likewise, Nissan's engineers made sure the Titan equaled or exceeded the competition in the big five big-truck attributes: horsepower, torque, towing capacity, cab size, and bed size.

Nissan had the right idea. It didn't even bother making a regular-cab Titan, as those account for less than twenty percent of full-size-pickup sales. We chose the extended-cab model, which Nissan calls the King Cab, but Nissan also makes a crew-cab model with four full-size doors and a bed that's a foot shorter than the King Cab's 6.5-foot box.... Read full article