Half-Ton Heavy Weight

The Nissan Titan XD gets a gasser.

THE NISSAN TITAN WAS FIRST introduced for the ’04 model year, and it basically went unchanged for 11 years following. During that time, the traditional big players in the market—Chevrolet, Ford, and Ram—all redesigned their 1⁄2 ton offerings (sometimes several times over), with more power, capability, style, and interior appointments. By the last model year for the Titan in ’15, the truck was showing its age inside and out, and it showed in sales lagging far behind in last place.

That all created a pretty high bar for Nissan to meet if they wanted to be competitive in the highly coveted truck market. These utilitarian productivity makers offer high profit for manufacturers, but they also need to be high volume. In an effort to recover those sales, Nissan pulled out all the stops with the early 2015 introduction of the “heavy half” Titan XD with a Cummins-developed turbo diesel V-8 at the 2015 North American International Auto Show. We had to wait to get our hands on the gas-powered model.

Now, a year and half later, it is finally in our hands. For the gas engine, the Titan XD got quite the upgrade ovr the previous engine for a total of 390 hp and 401 lb-ft of torque. The engine is matched to a Jatco-sourced seven-speed automatic transmission. The engine is made at Nissan’s production facility in Decherd, Tennessee, and the company is quite proud of that fact, as well as the rest of the truck’s American sourced manufacturing. Outside of a numerically higher axle gear ratio of 3.36:1 and a 6,000-rpm tach, the rest of truck is identical to its oil-burning brethren.