During Nissan’s recent presentation of its 2016 Titan XD, an engineer revealed a chart that was pretty telling: truck sales for the automaker are low—very low compared to industry stalwarts like Chevy, Ford and Ram. In fact, Nissan was at the bottom of the list, below Toyota.
To get a bigger piece of the market, Nissan developed a very competitive truck—so competitive that with a beefy Cummins diesel engine, larger frame, increased cooling capacity, over 2,000 pounds of payload capacity and over 12,000 pounds towing, it’s really gone beyond a 1/2-ton truck into a 5/8-ton beast.
It’s what their engineers, most of whom have been with the truck since its debut in 2003, call whitespace—an area more or less that is unknown, unexplored, unconquered.
In other words, it takes some guts to go there. It takes innovative thinking and a willingness to keep reaching out for more ideas, more power, more comfort.
Based on research, which included customer focus groups, Nissan believes they have tapped a market niche that will respond. Texas sure did. In October, the Titan XD won the prestigious 2015 Truck of Texas award.
But that was Texas, and this was Arizona, where a mass of reporters that seemed to rival a White House press conference had converged this past week to carefully look over the new kid on the block.
