Nissan is hosting Brian Murphy, owner of a 2007 Nissan Frontier, at the 2020 Chicago auto show this week. Who is this seemingly random customer? Well, Brian's truck just rolled over 1 million miles in January—well, the digital odometer quit at 999,999 miles, but Nissan verified the mileage using the trip odometer—and that feat got him a ticket to the Chicago auto show, because obviously any automaker would be thrilled to put such an example of its vehicles' durability and longevity on display. Honda's done it. So has Volvo. Oh, and Hyundai, too.

His Frontier is a cool spec, too, especially for being local to Chicago where it obviously is cold, wet, and snows a lot for most of the year. It's a King Cab XE with two-wheel-drive (not four-wheel-drive!), the Frontier's base 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine, and—get this—a five-speed manual transmission. Brian uses the truck to make deliveries, hence why he was able to put so many miles on the pickup in such a relatively short period of time. According to Nissan, Brian drove his Frontier about 300 to 400 miles per 12- to 14-hour per day, amounting to roughly 77,000 miles annually.

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Billed as "Chicago's most dependable delivery driver," Brian is an old-school guy, never using GPS to find his way around the city. In something that might come as a shock to any Chicagoan, Brian also has a perfect driving record "free of any moving violations." Given how the city has been littered with trigger-happy speed and red-light cameras since this Frontier was purchased, your native-to-Chicago author is gobsmacked.

The Frontier also didn't spend much time off the road in the past 13 years, either. Its owner says he changes the oil every 10,000 miles. He replaced the original clutch at 801,000 miles—again, he must be the gentlest driver on the planet, given the demands stop-and-go urban driving place on clutches—and preemptively replaced the timing chain at 700,000 miles. The alternator and radiator were swapped out at 450,000 miles, and shortly after that, Brian replaced the driver's seat. The engine and transmission are original, and we couldn't spot a single fleck of anything resembling rust on the red-painted body. Again, to anyone familiar with the upper Midwest and Chicago in particular, Brian might be starting to sound like some kind of vehicle-age-defying wizard.

If there's one amusing side effect of this heartwarming tale of vehicular servitude and dependability, it's the reminder that Nissan's current Frontier has been around for a very long time. Brian's truck looks basically the same as the ones available brand-new in any American Nissan dealer right now, mostly because it is the same as those trucks. Nissan has been selling this Frontier since 2004, and increasingly positioning it as a value player against the likes of newer, better trucks such as the Ford Ranger and Chevrolet Colorado. It will finally be replaced in the coming year or so by an updated model, but it'll take some time for hard-working owners like Brian to rack up seven-digit odometer readings on the 2022 Frontier.