• Market analysis firm AutoPacific says nearly a third of Nissan truck buyers surveyed would consider a PHEV pickup truck from the brand. 
• This week, Nissan unveiled a PHEV version of the Frontier Pro truck at the Shanghai Auto Show. 
• Nissan says the Frontier Pro PHEV won’t come to the U.S.

A lot of manufacturers are putting their eggs in the fully electric, large, expensive pickup truck basket. Just the other week, Volkswagen dashed the hopes of every cheap EV hatchback enthusiast to pieces when it announced it wouldn’t be bringing the ID.1 or ID.2 to the US, and instead would focus on building yet another electric pickup for US consumption.

But the release of the new Nissan Frontier at the Shanghai Auto Show this week, and the interest around it, got me thinking about what automakers are doing wrong. 

I don’t know what sales charts they’re looking at or the crystal ball they’ve been consulting, but it’s becoming clearer that big electric pickup trucks might not be the move, no matter how good they are. The Cybertruck is stuck on dealership lots with incentives to get it moving, while Ford has had spells of idling production of the F-150 Lightning at its Dearborn, Michigan plant. Don’t even ask about the Silverado EV’s not-so-good resale values.

Despite the lackluster sales performance of some of the larger EV pickups, research from AutoPacific shows that there’s still a sizable number of people who want some sort of electrification with a bed. It just won’t be in the form of a full-size truck. 

“When we’ve surveyed future mid-size pickup truck buyers, our AutoPacific research has found that 23% of them would be interested in a PHEV, a stark difference compared to just 14% demand for exclusively EV power. Jumping up a size, it is a similar scenario for full-size pickup truck buyers, as there’s more interest in plug-in hybrid powertrains than pure electrics,” wrote Robby DeGraff, the Manager of Product and Consumer Insights at the automotive analyst firm AutoPacific.

Furthermore, DeGraff explained that the desire for a PHEV truck jumps to nearly a third of buyers when Nissan as a brand is broken out of the statistics of truck buyers as a whole.

This is why it’s such a shame that Nissan is adamant that it has no plans to bring the PHEV pickup to North America. Even if the Chinese Frontier Pro PHEV’s 84-mile EV range would likely not go as far on the U.S. EPA cycle, it would still be enough to provide electric, engine-off driving for many pickup truck buyers. If Nissan is curious as to how a PHEV pickup could perform in North America, all it has to do is look to Mexico or Australia, where the BYD Shark is starting to make inroads. For once, perhaps a legacy automaker could beat a Chinese EV maker to the punch, at least when it comes to the U.S. 

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Source: Nissan

In fact, the demand for a PHEV mid-sized pickup seems to go hand-in-hand with the announcement of the Slate pickup truck. True, its 150-mile range and single-motor design likely won’t be able to tow or haul very far, but there’s more to the story here. Price and real-world utility of the Slate truck, or a theoretical mid-sized PHEV truck, make them a lot more attractive than full-sizers for many people. Few can afford the nearly six-figure price tags of trucks like the Rivian R1T or Tesla Cybertruck.

Photo by: Slate

If Slate and Nissan both find success with their respective not-so-large electrified trucks, then perhaps it’ll persuade more automakers to back away from the overly huge EV trucks and invest in smaller and cheaper designs. 

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