Yahoo Autos Looking back on 60-plus years of Nissan pickups
With the introduction of the 2022 Nissan Frontier, we're getting the truck's first comprehensive overhaul in a decade and a half. This midsize pickup has a not-so-midsize history here in America, and it's one we thought we'd explore a bit in the wake of the new truck's unveiling.
To simply say that the small Nissan pickup's history in the United States predates the company's use of the name "Nissan" is, frankly, understating it. Nissan's small pickup isn't just noteworthy for its longevity; it was the first true compact pickup sold in the United States, starting with the 220 chassis in 1959 — 62 years ago — but the generation that really put it on the map was the 520 chassis, which was introduced in the mid-1960s.
Fascinatingly, this should have been the 420 chassis, but the Nissan mothership decided to skip that designation. Yeah, something referencing 420 in the 1960s might seem amusing to us now, but believe it or not, Nissan's hang-up was linguistic, not social, as the phrase for the number "420" sounds similar to a Japanese term that loosely translates to something along the lines of "discourtesy." But for that quirk of Japanese phonetics and a mid-cycle update, we might have gotten a 1969 Datsun 420. Elon would have been proud; Nissan executives, not so much. The 1969 Datsun pickup was also the first compact truck sold in the United States with a half-ton payload rating; there's probably another joke in there too.
The 620 chassis brought more improvements and firsts for the Datsun, including the first long-bed compact truck and the first King Cab body for the Nissan/Datsun lineup. It also looked incredibly cool. Your author's father drove one similar to the one pictured above — a 1976. No, that isn't us.
In the 1980s, the iconic boxy Nissan pickup started to emerge. While the Hardbody didn't arrive until later in the decade, even the earlier models started to pick up some of the cues we'd come to associate with later examples of the pickup. In 1983, Nissan became the first importer to build a truck in the United States. It was still the 720; the D21 didn't go into production until 1985.
