Yahoo Autos The 2020 Nissan Frontier Is a Truck Removed From Time
The Nissan Frontier underwent a pretty huge change for 2020, though you'll never spot it from the curb. The sheetmetal is the same as it's been since the model-year 2009 facelift, and much of the Frontier remains unchanged since the truck debuted for 2005. Everything big here is happening under the hood.
For 2020, Nissan did away with both the 152-hp 2.5-liter four-cylinder and the 261-hp 4.0-liter V-6, and replaced them with one powertrain choice: an all-new 3.8-liter V-6 cranking out 310 hp and 281 lb-ft of torque. A nine-speed automatic is the only transmission available, and the truck comes in 2WD or 4WD.
That's a pretty major change in a truck that's seen precious few updates over its long tenure. The result is a pickup that feels strangely removed from time.
The Frontier is old. You notice it the moment you hop in. The hard plastic dashboard and blunt steering wheel harken back to the days when Carlos Ghosn was the whiz kid saving Nissan, not an international fugitive. Nissan made tiny changes to the truck's insides for 2020: A leather-wrapped shift knob that looks like new old stock from 2005, an engine start/stop button tucked at the base of the dashboard. There are a half-dozen disparate materials adorning the interior, and none of them feel particularly nice.
The brand-new Frontier Pro-4X crew cab I sampled was almost nostalgic to drive. The steering had heft. The windowsill was at perfect elbow height. The gauges were dark in the daytime and backlit at night. The stereo held a tiny touchscreen with satellite radio and nav, but beyond that, the only interfacing I did was with pedals and steering wheel.
In a way, it was refreshing. I've driven a bunch of brand-new pickups in the past few months, all full-size domestics with plenty of luxury options. Trucks you'd hesitate to hop into with dirty jean on. We love pickups in part because driving them makes us feel capable—able to haul a load of mulch or pick up a credenza at a yard sale at a moment's notice. Something about a whisper-quiet ride and an iPad-sized touchscreen waters down that feeling. The Frontier has that Old Truck Charm in spades.
And with the new engine, it's a downright peppy truck. The 3.8-liter makes its power pretty high on the tach by truck standards—the horsepower max comes at 6400 rpm, just 200 away from redline, and the torque peaks at 4400—but you don't need to rev the snot out of it to get going. It's kind of fun having a deep-breathing N/A engine in a world that's gone small-bore turbo.
The nine-speed auto helps a lot. Driven gently, it obsesses over keeping the revs low, but it's happy to shed gears with even a light prod at the throttle. When this Frontier was penned, 310 hp would have seemed huge in a midsize truck like this. With your foot to the floor, it still does. The Pro-4X off-road suspension was a little busy on rough roads, but overall, the Frontier was a good-handling and relatively comfortable ride.
The new drivetrain really wakes up this elderly truck. It almost makes it feel like a restomod. Driving a brand-new 2020 Frontier with the new VQ38 engine is like hopping in a brand-new, 15-year-old pickup with a healthy tune.
It's also a reminder of what we used to expect of pickup trucks. The Frontier is one of the only true compact pickups left. Colorado and Ranger are basically the light-heavyweight boxers of the truck world, just big enough to be a pain to maneuver or park in tight situations. No wonder Toyota hasn't felt the need to touch the Tacoma in ages.
And that gets us to a problem. This punchy new drivetrain adds a hefty premium to the Frontier's price tag. The cheapest one you can buy in 2020 stickers at $26,790, a $7500 increase over last year—for a King Cab with shorty rear doors, on steel wheels. As The Drive points out, this means there isn't a single new pickup you can buy for under $20,000 in the U.S. market. The four-wheel drive crew-cab Pro-4X I sampled starts at $37,490. That's strong money for a truck you could park in the background of a movie about the White Sox winning the 2005 World Series.
Of course, this is a stop-gap. That all-new drivetrain is slated to star in a fully-redesigned Frontier that's due in the 2021 model year. We suspect Nissan will do to the Frontier what every other automaker has done to their small truck: make it bigger, more luxurious, and all around closer to what we used to expect of a full-size pickup. The loss of the bare-bones Frontier will just be another marker of the inexorable passage of time.
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