Nissan pickup blows the market apart with two Leaf battery packs in the one truck
Nissan chose the Brazil motor show at Sao Paulo to spring a surprise with their Nissan Frontier Pick up, which sports two battery packs from the Nissan Leaf. The new Frontier Sentinel is not an electric vehicle, but a bespoke search and rescue vehicle using the battery packs to power equipment and systems in a vehicle that is designed to operate in the diverse Brazilian terrains.
With enough power onboard to power the average house, the truck will have both heated and cooled sections for rescue needs and carrying medicines. The prototype will carry rescue and infra-red drones with the hard top mocked up as a launch pad, ideal for a return to home that is built in to most drones.
In reality, it is a design exercise by the techies at Nissan trying to find uses for batteries once they have run their life in an electric car. As the efficiency of the battery falls, second use will become big business and no doubt a buzzword of the coming years.
There is of course a second view of this. To test the market reaction to an electric truck. With VW, Tesla and others working on just such a product, maybe Nissan are taking the chance to test the market.
