I Want to Believe: Nissan May Find a Way to Bring Back the Xterra

Do you miss the Nissan Xterra? Me, too. Appropriately blocky and truck-like in all the right ways, Nissan’s midsized off-road SUV was a great blend of tough looks and actual, y’know, functionality.

The old Xterra vanished from showrooms in 2015. Reading between the lines of a statement made by the head of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi’s light commercial vehicle division and reported by Aussie site Drive, a new one may be on the horizon.

Speaking at this year’s Tokyo Motor Show, Ashwani Gupta made very encouraging noises about the future of body-on-frame vehicles in the company’s lineup.

“What I can assure you is Nissan is concentrating and Nissan is extremely competent on frame-based vehicles, frame-based trucks and frame-based SUVs and we are going to cover each and every segment of frame,” said Gupta. “Now when? I think you’ll have to wait a little bit longer, please wait a little bit longer to Beijing Motor Show.”

Granted, this statement was made to Australian media, whose home market has a vehicle mix quite different than our own. Still, with carmakers on a never-ending quest to streamline their global offerings and cut the number of individual platforms, there’s room to suggest that a hairy chested body-on-frame SUV in the style of Xterra may make a return to American showrooms.

Given our market’s thirst for SUVs and crossovers, and automakers’ thirst for profits, such a machine would make a lot of sense if Nissan can affordably adapt the platform to suit North American tastes and preferences. Most of Nissan’s current crop of high-riders are unibody designs, from the Rogue Sport all the way up to the seven-passenger Pathfinder, which ditched its rough-and-tumble roots several years ago. Only the slow-selling Armada uses a BoF design.

It has been widely reported that the next Frontier mid-sized truck will be unique from the Navara pickup sold in other markets, as the company feels the Navara platform is too agricultural for this side of the pond. Looking at the engineering effort put into the Canyon/Colorado twins, not to mention the popular Tacoma, they may have a point. Spreading the development costs over two models, especially with one whose nameplate enjoys good juju, would make a lot of sense.

The old Xterra has legions of fans, thanks to the trucklet’s rough-n-ready image and the chops to back it up. It is certainly not a machine one would be afraid to get dirty and, thanks to Nissan’s glacier-like design cycle, an ’05 looks remarkably like a ’15. All this helps to buoy the Xterra’s value on the used car market.

If any this comes to fruition, Nissan wouldn’t be the only OEM bringing back a popular nameplate. Ford is currently in the never-ending throes of bringing back the Bronco (if they don’t show a concept this year in Detroit I’m going to hurl this laptop into the sea) and GM has been making overtures about putting the Blazer name on some sort of machine in the near future.

Nissan has not officially announced any timetable for a new Xterra or Frontier. Won’t keep us from hoping for one, though.

[Images: Nissan]