Nissan aiming to address misjudgement by introducing more up-end Navaras

Nissan will reportedly up the ante for the current generation Navara as a result of misjudging demand for flagship models in Australia.

Now four years old, and having already undergone a series of revisions Down Under with the most recent addition being the off-road focused N-Trek Warrior (pictured), Nissan Australia Managing Director Stephen Lester has indicated that more derivatives are planned beyond the introduction of said model.

“There’s certainly a couple of things in the background that are in the works. You can guess at what those are and there wouldn’t be any surprise and you probably wouldn’t be that far off base,” Lester told goauto.com.au on the sides of the Tokyo Motor Show.

While stopping short of confirming that a Navara-based rival for the Ford Ranger Raptor despite the introduction of the Warrior, he however stated that such a model would need more power in terms of either displacement or electrification. He however declined to comment on the prospect of Nissan offering a V6 Navara along the line of the 3.0-litre V9X turbodiesel available in the previous generation D40.

“With the old D40 Navara, we had the V6 diesel, which we unfortunately haven’t had in the D23. But we are working to find a solution,” he said.

The possibility of the Navara being equipped with the 3.0-litre V6 from the Mercedes-Benz X350d, while the most logical choice, seems highly unlikely after the three-pointed star’s Product Manager for Australia, Scott Williams, bluntly remarked that “they will never get the V6”.

“This is no badge-engineered Navara like the Renault Alaskan is, for example. This vehicle is 50mm wider while the tracks are 70mm wider. So what does that mean? It effectively means every panel has to be different to match, from the front, side, the glass areas – all unique to X-Class,” Williams told the publication last year.

“The result is chalk and cheese that’s the extent of the engineering that’s gone into our version of the Nissan chassis, without going into too much detail. You would think all those little parts wouldn’t add up to such a big difference, but it does. All that engineering work, which is not easy to see from point blank, does add up to quite a big difference”.

In the same interview, Nissan Light Commercial Vehicle Vice-President, Francois Bailly, describing the Raptor as a “very interesting pick-up truck”, stated that Yokohama is looking into the “demands of top end models like the Raptor”, but like Lester, declined to comment when asked about a V6 engine.

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