Here’s something I figured out pretty quickly at the Shanghai Auto Show this past week: You can tell a lot from which cars and which brands the crowds are interested in.

This event is, after all, the biggest annual automotive trade show (along with its biennial counterpart in Beijing) in the world’s largest new car market and one utterly dominated by first-rate electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. It’s as competitive a market as they get. Every company that comes here has to bring their A-game. Yet even when they do, Chinese buyers, journalists, engineers, executives and influencers can only be bothered to care about the best of the best. 

That cool new Buick we wish we had in the U.S.? That stand was a ghost town. So was Lincoln’s. Next to Lincoln, however, people were literally getting in lines to sit inside the Li Auto Mega, an electric van that’s already been on sale for a year. This isn’t even a national pride thing; plenty of Chinese brands struggled to capture attention as well. In a car market this big, there are always bound to be winners and losers. 

That’s why I was profoundly surprised, on the two days I was there, to see so much interest in Nissan’s offerings. Yes, Nissan. The one that seems to only make headlines for being on the verge of death these days.

But the Chinese folks at the show, plus any Western attendees such as myself, couldn’t get enough of the cars Nissan had on display: several examples of the Nissan N7 all-electric sedan, and one bright yellow Nissan Frontier Pro PHEV, which made its debut at Shanghai. Both cars were pretty mobbed on the two days I went to the show.

My colleague Kevin Williams and I both wondered, why the hell can’t these be sold in the United States? Because we’re convinced they would capture the same level of attention over here.

Let’s start with the Nissan N7. The world first saw it a few months ago and a full year before that as the Nissan Epoch Concept. It’s finally going on sale in China soon, made through Nissan’s joint venture with local partner Dongfeng. Spec-wise, it’s nothing terribly exciting. You can have either a 58 kWh or a 73 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery (LFP) battery, a range of 316 miles (510 km) and 388 miles (625 km), respectively, and up to 268 horsepower. It’s super aerodynamic at just 0.208 Cd, but it makes do with a 400-volt EV architecture.

The N7 does, however, offer a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor for the kinds of first-rate software features Chinese buyers demand, including DeepSeek AI integration. All in all, it’s kind of a mid-tier EV for China’s ultra-advanced market, but not everything needs to be a groundbreaking supercar. 

Photo by: Patrick George

Photos of the Nissan N7 and Nissan Frontier PHEV Pickup Truck from the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show.

But the N7 has one big thing going for it: it looks fantastic. Perhaps a bit generic in a country where many new EVs boast sleek lines for aerodynamics and thin LED lights for efficiency, but in person, it’s quite handsome. I think the crowds at Shanghai felt the same way; show-goers were lining up to get video, take photos and poke around inside. 

Photo by: Patrick George

Photos of the Nissan N7 and Nissan Frontier PHEV Pickup Truck from the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show.

Arguably, that’s where it shines the most. The interior looks like the kind of car we should’ve gotten if Nissan had kept up its arms race with Tesla instead of… well, doing whatever it is it did instead of that. You get a display in front of the driver, a larger tablet in the dashboard, soft touch materials throughout (including with creamy white and navy colors, a seemingly common combo in China) and enough buttons and switches to avoid complete and total minimalism. 

It’s a nice EV. It looks like it would be a fine Tesla Model 3-fighter in America, albeit without that car’s higher-performance specs. But as Kevin said, “Why isn’t this being built in Smyrna, with U.S.-compliant batteries and software? People in America would drive this thing.” I agree with him. 

Photo by: Patrick George

Photos of the Nissan N7 and Nissan Frontier PHEV Pickup Truck from the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show.

But the real sense of missing out comes from that Frontier Pro PHEV. China isn’t a very big pickup truck market. They’re largely treated as commercial vehicles here and often restricted from going certain places, like elevated freeways. This new Frontier is one of several new truck models trying to give it a go, and since this is China, it’s an electrified truck—Nissan’s first. (It’s incredible how a company that so pioneered electrified vehicles is just now getting around to adding battery power to its trucks, in the middle of the 2020s, but here we are.) 

Photo by: Patrick George

Photos of the Nissan N7 and Nissan Frontier PHEV Pickup Truck from the 2025 Shanghai Auto Show.

The Frontier Pro PHEV gets a 1.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine mated to an unspecified battery, although we do know that it delivers up to 6 kilowatts of power. And it’ll do an impressive 84 miles (135 km) on purely electric power, and while that’s on China’s generous testing cycle, it would probably shame many of our PHEVs. It’s the product of another partnership, essentially a reskinned Dongfeng Z9. But Nissan leaned into its heritage here with a grille and overall design that apes the 1980s Nissan D21 hardbody pickup. 

Photo by: Nissan

Nissan Hardbody/Frontier Pro

I know that our current reality of tariffs and software bans and sanctions on battery materials make Chinese-imported vehicles like this impossible. But as with many other EVs and PHEVs I have driven here over the past week, it does feel like the American market is missing out by not getting these vehicles—or at least, these kinds of vehicles from Nissan. 

Ultimately, they make me wish history had gone a different way—that Nissan would’ve kept up its investments into cars like the Leaf or even the Altima Hybrid and figured out a way to stay in the lead on electrification. Perhaps we wouldn’t have exactly these cars, but something like them instead. Meanwhile, back home, Nissan has nothing for U.S. buyers except the usual excuses and… the Kicks? The Ariya, I suppose? More expensive crossovers, more canceled EV plans, and more excuses. 

Supposedly, Nissan has some big turnaround plans in the works for the U.S. and its global markets. I know that revamped Dongfeng vehicles likely won’t be part of those grand designs. But if good-looking, well-priced Nissan EVs and PHEVs can impress Chinese buyers, then imagine what could be accomplished if the automaker stuck with a real electrification strategy and actually got it done, for a change.

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Source: Patrick George

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