2023 Nissan Frontier | Last Man Standing

The 2023 Nissan Frontier. When this thing was first introduced, it was outdated and honestly not that competitive. But now it's a novelty. This is the last naturally aspirated V6 truck you can buy. It's also affordable. This offers a tried and true solution that is not going to bankrupt you. It starts at under $30,000 and is fully, fully equipped at $46,000. You can get a well-equipped Frontier in the mid to high 30s, which is a bargain in today's market. Now, before we head into the shop and put this thing up on the lift and give you a very brief overview of what this thing has to offer from a technical perspective, here's an overview of the exterior and interior usability. When it comes to packages, well, there's a bunch of different trims, but you can either get this as an extended cab or this crew cab. You can get it as either a five or six foot bed. And best case when it comes to towing is in the mid to high 6,000 pound range. When you get this as a crew cab, yes, the backseat's not the largest, but it's a pretty usable truck. You can fit back there in a pinch as a full-size adult. The rear seats fold up. There's good storage in the door cards and all of your controls, whether it be your steering wheel controls, your HVAC, your four-wheel driver off-road controls are all physical. It's an easy to use truck. There's good visibility. It's something you never think about. What does this do? It's just a very usable, non-frustrating vehicle. But with that said, I think it's time for us to put this thing up on the lift. Underneath the Nissan Frontier, this is the Pro 4X. This is the most expensive model they currently sell. And with all the optional packages, it caps out at about $46,000, which, to be honest, makes this a fairly affordable vehicle. Now, we've already covered the new Frontier in the past, but here are the highlights. This is the third generation of the Frontier. This is an ancient truck. The styling is inspired by the Nissan hard bodies of yesteryear, and sadly, Mark and I both lack hard bodies. What do you need to know from a mechanical perspective? They've updated the ladder chassis. They've made it more rigid. There's more NVH material. And now you only get one drivetrain, a 3.8-liter VQ V6. It's naturally aspirated, and it's paired to a 9-speed automatic. It's Nissan's 9-speed that they pretty much put in everything at this point. Depending on trim level, this is either a rear-wheel-drive truck or a four-wheel-drive truck. And when you go to the Pro 4X, which this is, you get Bilstein dampers, skid plates, and an e-diff in the rear paired to the four-wheel-drive setup. With all that said, I think it's time for us to take this for a quick drive. Mark, I've got that perfect 100 credit score because I'm in a Nissan, but I'm not in any Nissan. I'm in the Nissan Frontier 4X or Pro 4X. Why does it sound like that when you accelerate? Because this is the last mid-sized truck that you can buy with a naturally aspirated V6 in the United States. Who wants that? People who don't want ---- to break, and that is the primary reason you buy this thing. It's cheap. With the most recent updates that we talked about a couple years ago on the 9-speed automatic, the drivetrain is no longer totally inadequate, and things don't break. You've got physical controls. That's the perk of this thing, and you can get financed if you have a perfect 100 credit score because it's a Nissan. What do you think? You've driven this before. You've driven it briefly before this drive. It's like perspective, right? You know, you're getting into something like this not because we haven't done 25 videos on it over the course of 30 years. It's because things are changing and evolving so quickly in the automotive segment of everything going to turbocharged four cylinders or hybridization. So, you know, the benefit of that is those cars and trucks have become more refined, quieter, better riding, better transmission programming, better tech. I mean, you can say most everything is better. The big question mark, in my opinion, when you're looking at something like this, one, you're buying it for price. The second thing you're buying it for is you don't want all of the question marks that come with a lot of the new technology that hasn't been flushed out over, you know, 10 years. So what you're getting here you already know, and that's really rare to say. It's something we constantly said about the old, you know, Toyota products, the Tacos and the Tundras. Like it may not have been the best product compared to new ones, but you knew exactly what you're getting, and that's why you buy this along with the fact that you really can't complain about that you can get this for like the high 30s and get it well equipped for the high 30s, and you can get it for way less than that too. Yeah, and that's the that's the one thing that Frontier has going for it, because purely objectively when you talk to really anyone who's driven all these vehicles, it doesn't score well dynamically. The gearbox tuning, the feature set, all of that is not the best, but it's good enough to justify its cheap price, and if you bought this thing, you could keep it for a very, very long time. The only thing you have to worry about with Nissan products is rust. Yeah. And, you know, who knows that the nine-speed automatic is going to hold up. Yes, it's not as proven as the old archaic like four or five-speed that used to be in this thing or six. I don't even remember at this point, but you buy this thing, you keep it a long time, you hope it doesn't rot out, and if you just need a tool, an appliance truck that can do some off-roading, can do some towing, you can do all the utility stuff you're expecting. Yeah, I want to speak to kind of like our viewer mentality, because I see it's like a split, right? Like if you have a lot of money and disposable income, you definitely don't want this. Yeah, you buy like a ZR2 or a Ranger Raptor. You're gonna flip anyway, but the other counterpoint is is not everybody needs and wants endless amounts of features that continually to jack up the price. I don't need a self-driving 2.5 in a truck. I don't need a 50-inch screen. I don't need perfect ride refinement. I don't need it to be the quietest luxury car truck experience. Sometimes you don't need that, and you don't want it, and you can live with the compromises this makes for the pros of it just being simple, and you're buying in, you know, for a lower price tag. And I think manufacturers really haven't figured that out, and they're gonna have to figure that out if want to continue in existence, because as our economy starts to crumble for the middle class, and you know, people that don't have a lot of money, you're gonna need affordable products. And part of the way you do that is, we had this conversation, you start stripping back on ---- that you really don't need in a car for a point A to point B machine or an appliance tool, as to your point. So I think this does it really well. You know, it depends on who you are. You know, it really does depends on what place you're in, but I think they've done a great job here for giving you most everything that you need to make this a functional tool. Yeah, and you can, the fact that, again, you don't have to spend $46,000 like this off-road fully loaded variant. You can get most of the things that you want and need in a truck that you're gonna be driving in all the seasons for in the mid to high 30s, before any rebates or discounts. You can get finance on these things at reasonable rates. They're probably one of the few vehicles that you can still get, like OEM subsidized financing, the threes, the fours, if you have decent credit. There's a lot of perks to this, and if you're looking at it as a used buyer, there are lots of options. Frontiers, because they've been building them so long, they don't have the residuals of Tacos. You can get into one of these things, again, you know what's gonna work. I just, I wish, to be honest, that it was as good to drive as things like the new Colorado and I imagine the new Taco are, but, you know, yeah, again, you know, that this is the trade-off, right? Like, some people might be really okay with this. I was looking at used cars yesterday, I'm like, okay, what am I gonna replace my own car with? I don't want new, I gotta go back, and the problem with a lot of newer cars that I like, they only go back to, like, 2019, right? And then there's these, like, big changes to them. With this, you can go back quite a ways, to be fair to it. Like, yeah, they made some updates and all that, but you can go back a long line and know exactly what you're getting here, and this is one of those few trucks or products that are on the market that you can do that with, and it's a huge pro to it. I mean, I'm gonna leave it at that. All right, Mark, let's head into the final thoughts. Final thoughts on the Nissan Frontier. What do you need to know? Well, it's the last dinosaur, it's the last body-on-frame, simple to work on, simple to live with truck, and that's what's appealing about it. Is it as objectively as good as the all-new Tacoma that we haven't driven yet, or the Colorado, or the upcoming Ranger? Probably not, but what you know is you can get one. You can probably get a discount on it, and it will outlive you, assuming you don't live in a state that salts. So with that, thanks for watching. I hope to see you soon.