Nissan family Van

Nissan has been full of little surprises in the utility-vehicle realm lately—the Rogue, the Cube, the Juke—and here’s another, although the word “little” doesn’t apply in the case of the NV cargo van. Not when the subject vehicle stands 105 inches tall, with a cargo hold capable of swallowing a couple of basketball teams—or maybe three or four juvenile giraffes—standing at full height.

The surprises here are multiple: first, that Nissan chose to play in this game at all. The full-size-van market amounts to about 300, 000 units in most years (although it dipped sharply in 2008 and ’09), and it’s dominated by Ford (about 50 percent) and General Motors (around 45 percent). The Sprinter, which has been sold here wearing Mercedes-Benz, Dodge, and Freightliner badges, has hitherto been the only tall van in this segment and accounts for the other five percent. So, it’s a relatively small market that is 95-percent owned by domestic makes whose loyal customers are hard to seduce. Apparently, Nissan took that as a challenge.

Another surprise is that Nissan chose to create a dedicated chassis for its new van. Aside from one crossmember, the NV’s fully boxed ladder frame—it looks as if it could have been sectioned out of New York’s 59th Street Bridge—shares nothing with the Titan pickup. That’s a lot of investment for what figures to be a small slice of a modest market, although we do expect Nissan to utilize this frame for a heavy-duty Titan or the next generation of the regular-strength pickup.

Pickup Power

Although the underpinnings are new, the powertrains are familiar, as both are from the Nissan pickup inventory. The base van with the high or standard roof is propelled by a 4.0-liter V-6 (261 hp, 281 lb-ft of torque) from the mid-size Frontier. The optional engine is the Titan’s 5.6-liter V-8 (317 hp, 385 lb-ft), which is standard in the top-spec 3500 and powered the example tested here. Both engines transmit power to the rear wheels via a five-speed automatic transmission. There is no four-wheel-drive option.