Nissan's New Xterra Won't Be An EV

Nissan plans to revive the Xterra SUV, its rugged Toyota 4Runner competitor. The SUV died out about a decade ago, taking with it Nissan's only body-on-frame off-road SUV alternative to the Toyota. Now, the brand has slowly begun to hint at its revival, leaving small details to the media ahead of the model's debut. Speaking to Car and Driver, Nissan's chief product and planning officer, Ponz Pandikuthira, said the Xterra will offer a pair of V6-based powertrains.

While the model was initially going to be an EV, Nissan, like nearly every other automaker selling cars in the US, has moved away from that. It's not hard to see why, with consumer demand falling flat following the discontinuation of federal EV tax subsidies last September. Now, the Xterra will be a body-on-frame SUV built with a gas-powered and a hybrid-assisted V6. "There will be a pure ICE," said Pandikuthira, referring to the acronym for internal-combustion engines.

"If we do ICE only, it will be V6, it won't be a four-cylinder turbo. Then we can build a hybrid off that," he continued. "What that hybrid execution looks like, when it debuts, how many months after the ICE version? Still a work in progress at this point."

Like Toyota, Nissan wants to lean into the Xterra's blocky roots: "I was in Japan two weeks ago, and I saw the car in the first foam full mock-up, it literally takes your breath away. When you're standing there, it's going to have a presence." The automaker says it has found ways to negate the typical aerodynamic penalties associated with building a giant brick on wheels, with Pandikuthira saying, "We found other ways to get the efficiency in the car."

Nissan also won't offer a manual transmission, an option in the previous Xterra, due to packaging. That's down to "the fact that you use up so much real estate in the center that people expect to use for storage." The other reason, says the Nissan exec, is because the brand wants the truck to be fun in other ways, coming from the "dynamic performance, suspension tuning, the tires that you use, the way the vehicle steers, and how that powertrain is calibrated."