Car Gazing
Nissan Frontier has traditional American feel
By Derek Price
There's something about new country music that's always bothered me. I can't stand listening to the stuff.
I don't have a problem with old country songs because they're genuinely rustic and refreshingly honest. They're about lyin' and cheatin' and drinkin' at the honkey tonk after workin' at the ranch all day.
And those old country singers are convincing not because they're great actors, but because they actually lived like they sang – rough and tough, sad and lonesome. If more people today compared their cushy, modern lives to the old country songs, Prozac would be completely unnecessary.
New country music, though, doesn't have the same trashy appeal. It's toned down, sanitized and neatly packaged in clean little snippets of electronic sound. It's about flying into stadiums on helicopters while covered head to toe in silver sequins, and it's sung by people who live in brick mansions with diamond-studded swimming pools and exotic sports cars in the garage.
New country music is nothing but Madonna in a cowboy hat and Elton John in leather chaps. It's revolting.
And that's why whenever I drive a new pickup, I wonder whether it's more of a Hank Williams truck – real, honest and hard-working – or more of a Keith Urban truck that's all about flash and dazzle.
Oddly enough, I drove a mid-size Japanese pickup this week that seems more like Hank than some of its American competitors do.
The Nissan Frontier would be out of place covered in rhinestones. It's a plain-Jane truck designed to do hard work in the country. And I love that.
It comes with some fairly flashy new features, sure enough. There's a factory-installed bedliner and big, beefy rails built into the bed so you can easily tie down all the big, beefy stuff you're hauling. It has a powerful V6 engine with variable valve timing and pistons that are covered with Teflon, for heaven's sake.
But when it comes right down to it, the Frontier is just a truck.
When you step into the driver's seat, you'd think it has DNA stretching back for generations in America. It doesn't, obviously, but it feels that way. Everything about it is easy to operate and easy to understand. It's comfortable and roomy, at least in the front seat, because mid-size trucks today are nearly as spacious as the full-size trucks from Hank's era.
When you drive a Frontier, it doesn't feel soft and squishy like a Toyota car. It feels rugged and sturdy, built like a 19th century steam locomotive that takes some actual heft to drive. The engine has a nice, deep roar, and the steering wheel requires a firm tug to get it to turn anywhere.
It's especially refreshing when compared to the big, expensive luxury trucks like the Lincoln Mark LT that are cluttering up America's highways. Nobody who drives a Lincoln truck would ever consider switching to a Frontier, and vice versa. They're as different as Merele Haggard and Faith Hill. But the fact that these two completely different vehicles could both fall under the same "pickup" category is astonishing.
Give me Merle and the Frontier any day.
(Derek Price is a newspaper editor and freelance writer living in Texas.
Contact him at dprice@cargazingonline.com)
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