Car Gazing
A truck you can live with
Mid-size Nissan Frontier has full-size performance without the drawbacks
By Derek Price
I know what I'm about to write is pure blasphemy considering I was born and raised in Texas, but I simply don't like big pickup trucks. Never have.
They're hard to park, ugly, noisy, get pathetic gas mileage, are less comfortable than a car and are hard to climb in and out of. As if that weren't enough, all but the best trucks feel like they're bouncing around the road on a suspension made of pogo sticks and pulled by an engine that sounds like it belongs in a two-story-tall Weed Eater.
I don't see the point of driving one unless you're towing a 10-ton yacht or carrying a load of granite down a mountain like they show in the commercials. I don't do those things, so I'd rather borrow or rent a truck when I really need one instead of suffering with driving one day in, day out.
So there, I said it.
Now that I got that blasphemy off my chest, I can tall you about the new Nissan Frontier, a truck that – oddly enough – I don't hate.
The Frontier is one of those just-right-size trucks that's significantly bigger than a dinky Ranger but smaller than the oafish F-150, Silverado and Ram. It's not so small that it's stupid, nor is it so big that you think you're driving a piece of real estate around town.
That just-right feeling also extends to the Frontier's performance. It's powered by a 4.0-liter V6 that makes 265 horsepower and gets 20 miles per gallon on the highway, enough to do some serious work without having to drink gas like a Kennedy at happy hour. It's not quite a fuel miser, either, but compared to the alternative of driving a full-size truck with a big V8, it could provide some welcome relief at the pump.
For better efficiency, Nissan offers a 2.5-liter, 154-horsepower, four-cylinder engine.
While I think the engine noise is an improvement over the previous Frontier's V6 – now, instead of sounding like a giant Weed Eater, it sounds like a bumblebee that ate too many beans – it feels fantastic from the driver's seat. It's very responsive and smooth, adjectives I rarely use to describe truck engines.
Overall, the Frontier looks and performs like a downsized Nissan Titan, and it's available with some of the same cool features that make the Titan stand out. Some of my favorites are a factory-applied, spray-on bedliner and a nifty system of adjustable tie-downs called Utili-track.
Pricing, like on most trucks, is spread over a huge range that depends on how you configure it. A basic, rear-wheel-drive, King Cab model with a four-cylinder engine starts under $16,000, and a NISMO off-road-equipped Crew Cab with four-wheel drive costs more than $27,000. In between to these two are 17 other flavors of Frontier with prices to fit virtually any budget.
Best of all, for a person who usually hates trucks, I found this one pretty darned comfortable to drive. It still had a pogo-stick suspension, but it was quiet and roomy enough on the inside to make up for the bounciness. Everything about it seemed like a perfect fit, neither too big nor too small, neither too wimpy nor too brutish.
And that's why I don't hate the Frontier.
(Derek Price is a newspaper editor and freelance writer living in Texas.
Contact him at dprice@cargazingonline.com)
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