From the August 1999 issue of Car and Driver.
Anyone who doubts Charles Darwin’s conclusions on the survival of the fittest should have a look at what’s going on in the automotive kingdom these days. Trucks are muscling out cars in a big way. And the trucks are mutating. Sport-utes that are used less for utility have become more sporting and luxurious. And pickup-truck beds, which are being used less often for hauling stuff, are atrophying. Evolution is reducing them to small, nearly useless vestigial appendages—like an ostrich’s wings.
Nissan’s Frontier crew cab is the first truck in the U.S. to manifest this evolutionary mutation. Its cab—the part that people actually use—has grown to accommodate a pair of 29-inch-long, front-hinged rear doors and a proper bench seat. To make room for this commodious cab on the two-door, extended-cab Frontier chassis, the six-foot bed had to shrink by almost 20 inches. A host of similar pickups will soon flood the market.
On paper, the idea seems as natural as, well, evolution. In its back seat, the four-door Frontier provides 36 cubic feet of passenger space (the same as in a Nissan Sentra) and boasts 32.4 cubic feet of cargo space outside in the bed. And it’s only as long as a Mercury Sable. To find a pickup with a rear seat as accommodating as this one’s, a buyer previously had to move up to a full-size, extended-cab truck measuring 18 or more feet long. Ever try to maneuver one of those babies in a supermarket parking lot? Bring your proof of insurance.
By comparison, this new Frontier handles as easily as a grocery cart. But it’s a compromised vehicle. Two adults fit comfortably enough in back for short trips (a third belt is provided with space for a little kid). But a low seat cushion and a lack of thigh support will force adult knees up to their chests and give the long-distance rider a sleepy keister. And getting in and out through the relatively narrow door opening is less than sedan-easy. Nissan’s new Xterra sport-utility, built on the same assembly line and based on the regular-cab Frontier chassis, has wider, taller rear doors and a higher, more comfortable seat—but you can’t hose out the back. Among pickups, the seat in an extended-cab Chevy Silverado is more comfy, but that truck, being 28 inches longer and a foot wider, is a parking-lot pariah.
The 54.7-inch-long cargo box is also compromised. Nissan offers a locking tonneau cover, or a cap, to enclose the bed area, but the owner’s manual warns that the crew cab cannot safely accommodate a traditional pickup-bed camper. The bed can just barely accept a cubic yard of mulch or dirt, but a 70-inch-wide front-end-loader bucket dumped diagonally across the box will still probably spill some of it. Drywall must overhang the closed tailgate and risks cracking.
And what about hauling around power toys, like dirt bikes, an all-terrain vehicle, or a Jet Ski? They’re all going to hang out the back. The load floor measures 76 inches from the front of the box to the rear edge of the lowered tailgate, so snowmobiles are out of the question, and only the shortest ATVs and wave hoppers will fit. At least tie-down loops are provided high in each corner of the box, and Nissan sells accessory roof-racks, bike racks, and a bed extender that fences in the area above the lowered tailgate.
One must take care not to overload this Frontier. Our top-drawer SE model weighed in at 4146 pounds. Back that out of the gross vehicle weight rating of 5200 pounds, and you’re left with a smallish 1054 pounds. Subtract the weight of four big guys, and they might be able to carry only a couple hundred pounds of gear in back. Towing capacity is 5000 pounds.
Still, we think the Frontier crew cab may be just the thing for a certain slice of the market. It’s available with rear- or four-wheel drive, but either way, it gets the heavier gauge, high-riding four-wheel-drive chassis and—hallelujah!—a standard 170-hp V-6 engine. The base Frontier XE crew cab starts at $17,810 with rear-wheel drive, another $2600 gets you the mechanical part-time, shift-on-the-crawl (below 25 mph) four-wheel-drive system with auto-locking hubs. (Manual-locking hubs are standard on four-cylinder Frontier four-wheelers.)
Our four-wheel-drive test truck came with SE trim ($1300), which adds 16-inch wheels and tires, fog lamps, step rails, body-color bumpers and wheel flares, and a few other trim pieces that give the otherwise bland Frontier a bit of attitude. With an automatic and all power accessories, the tab came to $23,840.
Nissan’s 3.3-liter SOHC 12-valve V-6 motivates this two-ton truck adequately, striding past 60 mph in 10.9 seconds. That compares favorably with the 11.3 seconds it took our last 3720-pound four-cylinder Frontier SE four-wheeler. Hard cornering on the knobby off-road tires produces loud moaning from the rubber and just 0.70 g of grip. Braking is similarly lackluster at 221 feet from 70 mph, despite the crew cab’s standard ABS. Those numbers would have placed the Frontier near the back of the pack in our last comparison of little four-wheel-drive extended-cab pickups (C/D, August 1995).
Perhaps what owners will brag about most is the quiet atmosphere inside their Frontier. Our sound-level meter managed to find 71 dBA of noise at 70 mph, which is just average for a truck, but our ears registered luxury-car levels of quiet and refinement. (The 75-dBA din kicked up by the V-6 under wide-open-throttle acceleration is less satisfying, however.) The Frontier also traverses potholed pavement and gravel washboard with a quiet suppleness that is rare in this class of vehicle. Nothing inside the cabin squeaks or rattles, although on certain frame-twisting bumps, the bed can be heard creaking around a bit. Build quality is excellent, with panel gaps matching those on an Infiniti sedan.
Our biggest gripe probably has to do with the recirculating-ball steering, which is a bit lifeless on-center. The power-steering boost also tended to lag some during quick transient maneuvers.
In the off-road department, we rank the Frontier and its Xterra sibling as merely average. The low range isn’t low enough to provide serious engine braking while descending steep grades, but the truck is competent for light four-wheeling. The owner’s manual concurs, stating: “Avoid driving in deep water or mud, as your Nissan is mainly designed for leisure use, unlike a conventional off-road vehicle,” whatever “conventional” implies in the off-road realm these days.
With the Frontier crew cab, Nissan has bred a new species within the genus Pickupus truckus. We like it, in that it gives us hope that if folks continue to ignore the box, it will shrivel into a sedan trunk. And if they keep driving on-road only, maybe the body will become lighter and lower, at which point pickups will have evolved back into cars. We toast that bright future.
Counterpoint
This Frontier evokes three words: versatility, practicality, and compromise. It can carry odd-shaped cargo such as a La-Z-Boy, a refrigerator, or a push mower, which sedans and most sport-utes cannot. It can also transport four adults to a wedding, be a rolling romper room with space for toys and contraptions (without looking like a minivan), haul lawn and garden stuff, and even tough it out off-road. There are compromises, sure, such as the limitations of the short box, but the crew cab is a practical car, truck, and sport-utility.
It’s a jack-of-all-trades and, as the saying goes, likely master of none—but it fits nicely in a one-car garage. —Cora Weber
Years ago, after a story took me to Central America and indirectly involved driving a four-door four-wheel-drive Nissan pickup, I wrote that eventually the U.S. market would realize the value of a genuine rear seat, even if it meant a shortened bed, and predicted that the manufacturer first to wade in would be rewarded with healthy sales. Nissan is that manufacturer, and although it’s too early to gauge the Frontier crew cab’s sales fate, a drive in it doesn’t alter my prediction. It won’t carry a four-by-eight sheet of plywood, but it will carry five adults—a trade-off that I, and probably a bunch of other pickup prospects, will cheerfully accept. —Steven Cole Smith
The Frontier crew cab may look like a good combination of SUV practicality and pickup-truck utility, but looks can be deceiving. That’s especially true when it comes to the “four full-size doors” that Nissan claims will allow five passengers to enter and exit with ease. The rear doors are almost 18 inches narrower than the fronts, so getting out is better described as extricating oneself. The same is true of the truncated cargo bed. Carrying three mountain bikes required a feat of packaging engineering. Rather than combine the best aspects of an SUV and a pickup, Nissan has compromised them. —Andre ldzikowski