Posted by Mark Williams | January 6, 2016

Now that the 2016 Nissan Titan XD is on sale, Nissan's next big project will be to update its aging midsize player, the Frontier. From our perspective, that can't come soon enough. The full-size Titan XD is trying to carve out a niche in unchallenged territory between the half-ton and three-quarter-ton segments; the next Frontier will not have that luxury. Our spy shooters are beginning to see more of a Nissan midsize here in the states, so it looks like we might be seeing something soon. Here's what our spies sent us:

"We caught this Nissan Navara test truck with taped badges parked in metro Detroit. This prompted us to check on one of Nissan's Michigan development centers, where we found more Navara test trucks — one of which was clearly marked as a diesel.

"Nissan has remained vague as to what, if anything, the foreign-market Navara might truly mean for the U.S. midsize pickup truck market. Nissan seems to be playing things coyly at the moment to avoid any chance of taking attention away from the all-new Titan XD full-size truck. With these new Navara test trucks spotted in the vicinity of one of Nissan's key U.S. testing hubs — curiously camouflaged to hide their Nissan identity — we're left to speculate whether the Navara could be the next Frontier, developed for the U.S. market to replace the current midsize truck.

"With the all-new global Navara pickup officially offered around the world this year as the NP300 Navara, Nissan actually appears to be combining two of its global trucks into a single model. The NP300 used to be a smaller, relatively outdated model servicing the Mexican market, while the larger Navara provided a much more modern take on the midsize truck. The NP300 Navara naming convention suggests that Nissan might be consolidating its global truck models — and now that Navaras are showing up in camouflaged form on U.S. turf, that global consolidation might also include a U.S.-market product."

KGP Photography images















