Article by Jacob Black. Photos courtesy of Nissan and by Autos.ca staff

Nissan’s new Titan/Titan XD pickup truck is a pretty big deal for a variety of reasons. First, this is only the second generation of a rig that’s been around since 2003. Second, it’s getting a Cummins diesel – something big truck owners have been goo-gah over for donkey’s years.

The Titan is an odd duck that doesn’t quite go toe-to-toe with the big boys in the segment from Ram, Ford and GM – but as I learned, that’s the point. After our comprehensive 2016 Nissan Titan Preview we were excited to quiz two of the biggest names in Titan land to help explain their approach.

The Titan is an odd duck that doesn’t quite go toe-to-toe with the big boys in the segment from Ram, Ford and GM – but as I learned, that’s the point.Rich Miller and Jeff Caldwell, two key figures in the Titan’s development, came to Toronto in February to give the press a rundown of Titan’s mission and why Nissan is now supplying a the diesel engine alongside its regular gas-powered V8.

There was a palpable connection between Rich and Jeff, who I quickly learned were both genuine truck guys – each with their own sordid truck history.

Rich Miller, Chief Product Specialist for the Titan program and Director of Product Planning for Trucks and SUVs at Nissan North America, has been with Nissan for 20 years and was involved in Titan from the outset. “I’ve been a truck guy my whole life, and I worked on the original Titan from when he [he really said “he”] was just a sketch on the back of an envelope and a concept we were kicking around,” Miller enthuses. “My team was the one that went out and studied the customer and the segment to understand, ’are we going to be in this segment or not?’

“I’ve been with Nissan 20 years and I have 15 years working on Titans. There’s a lot of heritage here.”

To understand just how passionate Miller and Caldwell are about their trucks, and to get a sense of the sort of thought process behind the new Titan, we have to skip forward to late in my interview when I asked the duo, “What’s the dumbest thing you’ve done in a truck?”

“My first truck was a two-wheel-drive truck,” Miller begins, a wry smile forming on his face. “When I was born, that truck drove me from Phoenix to our house in Washington. When I had that truck in college, I decided I wanted to find a good place to have a party. And I was out in the desert and I took the truck down a hill that was way too steep.

“When you go in some place, you gotta know you can get out. Well, I drove that truck down a steep, rocky granite slope in my two-wheel-drive truck with nothing in the back.

“This old, old desert rat pulls up at the top of the grade and looks down, and he says, ’Boy, you are stuck.’ He looked down at me, and I think he had one tooth, and he said, ’You are stuck down there and you are about 100 miles from anything.’

“I’m in the middle of the desert, in the mountains in Phoenix, and he said, ’The only way you’re getting out is to fill that thing with rocks, put it in low gear, and pray that they don’t bust in your back window and crash in on you, but that’s the only way you’re going to get out. Shocks are cheaper than a wrecker!’

“I remember him saying that as I’m going up the hill. And it made it, which was exciting but stupid.

Jeff Caldwell, General Manager of Pickup and SUV Engines at Cummins, had his own tale of truck folly.

“One of my summer jobs when I was a kid, I worked on a golf course.  And it was a golf course in Kentucky, so there were hills involved.”

Like Miller before him, Caldwell’s eyes twinkled as he told the story.

“My dad knew the groundskeeper, who said, ‘I’ll give your son some work this summer.’ He sent me in this two-wheel-drive pickup truck with a load of sod over a hill and he said, ‘Take the truck down.’

“I knew how to drive – I was 14 and I grew up on a farm – but he probably thought I’d show a little better judgement than to go straight over the hill. There was a little creek bed at the bottom… so, I ended up with the nose in the creek bed.

“Two-wheel drive and I’m trying to drive and steer it and it got away from me! Lucky I didn’t do more damage – and thankfully we had tractors around the course to pull me out.

“He got to tell my dad how stupid I was that night, but no harm, no foul, except I was pretty embarrassed.

“Trucks give you that sense of invincibility.”

Those real-life experiences lent themselves to the design process for Titan.

“I can tell you now when I go anywhere I know the capability of my truck,” Miller said. “And I’ve taken those trucks” – he points to the Titan on the stand over my shoulder – “I’ve got pictures of them at the Top of the World trail in Moab, Utah. You can take them anywhere.”

The new Titan will be sold with the 5.0L V8 Cummins diesel, and Caldwell explains that Cummins formatted the lump specifically for Titan.

“The only place this 5.0L V8 engine will be applied is in the Titan. We’re excited about that. We have a sister engine that’s a similar displacement but it’s for commercial trucks. It has a different breathing system, so they’re not identical. This is a unique engine for this unique truck.”

But why diesel? Ram has applied a diesel to their 1500, but Miller says Nissan isn’t playing follow the leader.

“We didn’t target to go after a competitor, we targeted the customer – or to give the customer a better option is the best way to say it. When we looked at the segment we noticed that there were a lot of half-ton buyers who were asking, ‘Why can’t I have a diesel engine in a half-ton truck?’ But to have a diesel engine that’s not just a grocery getter. They were asking for a diesel engine that was still a truck engine, meaning it could still tow, still haul, and get great fuel economy. They didn’t want to compromise.

“Then we had three-quarter ton customers saying, ’I’m tired of having the discomfort of a three-quarter ton truck. I don’t need to tow 30,000 lb or 23,000 lb, I need to tow 10-12,000 lb [4,500-5,500 kg – Ed].

“That made us look deeper into the segment, and what we were noticing is that back in 2003, 2005, the three-quarter ton trucks at the time were only 500 lb-ft of torque and they were towing between 12 and 13,000 lb, and they were happy with that truck.

“But since then the competitors have been saying, ‘I can tow more than you!’ ’No, I can tow more than you!’ And they upped 500, upped 500 – now they’re at 23,000 lb, but that same truck customer has the same trailer he had in 2005. He’s hauling the same trailer, the same tractor, the same snow machine. He’s hauling the same thing, but he doesn’t need a jackhammer to dig a hole in the backyard.

“That’s where Cummins came in.”

Again I prodded: why not just offer a refreshed version of Nissan’s own gasoline-powered V8?

“We can build a chassis,” Miller explained, “but we asked, ‘what kind of engine do you have that can give us that acceleration and towing power and give us great fuel economy?’

“And that’s when we got the 5.0L. I always joke about it, but when we started it had a little less torque than it does now and every time we talked I went up by five. He’d say 540 and I’d say, ‘What about 545?’”

Caldwell chuckled at that one. “He [Miller] talks about the torque wars, and now my arm’s about 180 degrees to where it used to be because he’s been twisting me saying, ‘I need a little bit more, just a little more!’”

“I like the triple-nickel, I like the 555,” Miller says, referencing the final torque output of the Titan’s diesel engine. “But in all seriousness it was about trying to get the truck into that backspace that has been vacated by our competitors moving off.”

Unsurprisingly, both men say the diesel engine is their favourite part of the new Titan.

“I like that when you’re towing, if the truck’s idling, you take your foot off the brake and it just walks away with the load. You don’t even have to push the accelerator down,” Caldwell says. “Low-end torque. That’s diesels and that’s what you’ve got to love about them.”

Miller agrees.

“I call it tenacity. That’s what I really like, the in-gear acceleration. A gas engine makes a lot of horsepower, they get those rpms up. And our gas engine is strong, but that comfort you get from a diesel engine when you don’t need to drop a gear to accelerate – that sense of acceleration you feel in your face and your body. When I want to pass somebody, I can lean on the gas. I don’t have to go deep into the gas to make that pass.”

“I’m training him to say ‘deep in the diesel’ – this isn’t gas!” Caldwell jokes.

Just when I’m thinking things are lighthearted, I start asking about the differences between Titan and Titan XD. Miller’s voice changes slightly, his face firming.

“In the XD, it’s not a game we’re playing here,” he says.

“Our Titan can tow 9,000 lb all day long, but if you want to go to 12,000 it’s not a final drive change. It’s a chassis change. It’s a frame change. It’s an engine change. It’s a total configuration change. It’s a big difference.

“Anybody who tows, they want to tow with something more substantial underneath them when they’re hauling something big behind them.”

For a brief moment I’m reminded of a wife calming her long-term husband when Jeff interjects.

“All of Nissan has talked of this as a ‘white space.’ Last night, I heard Rich use a term I liked even more.

“As he said, the other players in the Heavy Duty market have escalated, escalated, but this now is a backspace. It is really back where those trucks were from a torque capability 10 years ago. To his point, and you talk about kismet, but in 2004 we had a marketing group do a survey and they told us, 84 percent of the people that tow never tow more than 10,000 lb. So that’s the space where people are buying more truck than they ever need. And Rich is putting a Nissan Titan in that space that’s targeted exactly at that 10-12,000 lb, right where people need it.”

Nissan says there are benefits to building a smaller, less-capable truck that better targets what people need, rather than Hollywood numbers.

“There are handling benefits,” Miller says. “There are unsprung mass benefits, ride comfort, fuel economy; but it also comes down to the bottom line. If we don’t have to put the mass in the chassis to tow 30,000 lb then we can take that cost out of the truck, and that just rolls right back into the customer’s hands.

“There’s a lower cost of entry and better fuel economy, and when you look at the cost of ownership calculation they’re the biggest things. The durability and reliability are there. We’re not trading off. But when you build the right tool for the job – I talk about the jackhammer and the shovel. You don’t take a jackhammer to dig a small hole in the backyard. You use a shovel. It’s the right tool for the job.”