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Nissan Seeks to Juice Titan Pickup Truck Sales with 5-year Warranty


Bryan1

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After struggling to break into the full-size pickup market for more than a decade, Nissan wants to jump-start sales of its new Titan truck family by offering a five-year, 100,000-mile warranty, leapfrogging rival automakers.

 

The bumper-to-bumper warranty surpasses the industry standard of a three-year, 36,000-mile guarantee in the pickup truck sales segment.

 

“This is going to shake up the market,” Phil O’Connor, Nissan’s U.S. truck and sport-utility marketing director, told Trucks.com. “It is going to give buyers a reason to put Titan on their shopping list and give us a serious look.”

 

(snip)

 

Nissan says it wants to grab 5 percent of the market, which would be more than five times its current position. Such a share would require the automaker to sell roughly 100,000 trucks annually. The company has barely sold 7,000 Titans so far this year.

 

link: https://www.trucks.com/2016/08/15/nissan-titan-pickup-truck-warranty

 

 

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They would have been better off making the trucks less hideous.

 

I wanted to like the Titan XD, but I just can't. The looks are hideous, and the performance of the baby Cummins doesn't seem to be up to par. Not to mention, the XD diesel is only about 1 MPG ahead of the Super Duty in real-world fuel economy on Fuelly.

 

Now, a 5/100k warranty is pretty impressive, but not near enough to entice most people to buy a Nissan.

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A buddy of mine currently has a 14 F150 Ecoboost. Has not been happy with the mileage, complained about getting single digits on a trip to Minnesota in a strong headwind. He previously owned a 13 with the 5.0. He was happy with that motor and said that he wished his current truck had it. He ended up with the Ecoboost because he wanted the truck for other reasons, color, FX4, sport package and he wont order a vehicle. He has also griped about the low profile Pirelli Tires, can't say I care much for Pirelli's either.He has previously owned a Silverado and a Nissan Titan not to mention several other vehicles. (To say he, or his wife for that matter, do not keep vehicles very long, would be an understatement).

 

He has been looking at the Titan again in the PRO 4X package. He test drove a diesel and the gas version. He was not impressed with the Diesel at all. He just loves the big tires on the Titan and the Gas V8. (I suggested he put some bigger and more aggressive tires on his F150) He really thinks Titan looks good also but, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, since I think the Titan is hideous.

 

I suspect he will have a Titan soon, but he may own it a year or two.I will be curious what kind of mileage he will get. He will brag about the warranty also, but will never have it long enough to matter... :doh:

Edited by danglin
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The only way (in my opinion) for Nissan to improve their standing in the truck market at this point would be aggressive pricing. Lexus did this with their cars the first few years and lost money on cars which were so good that the price seemed like a stealing. Then they corrected the pricing when the happy customers came back.

 

The question is if Nissan's truck it that good so customers come back happy, or if they can get the price before discounts low enough to turn loyal truck owner's heads.

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This is a sales strategy that Hyundai employed to help move their cars. I think it is debatable whether that has led to Hyundai's success, or if it has more to do with building cars/CUVs that the public was interested in buying.

 

With that said, the truck market is a different beast. Truck buyers are a very loyal group. As a person that buys a new truck every three years or so, this tactic would never impact my decision, and not because I generally do not exceed the factory warranty of my trucks. I don't even consider purchasing anything but Ford trucks because they have always treated me good, and I believe they have the most compelling products.

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Extended warranty mainly appeals to retail buyers. But retail sales won't lift Nissan past its goal of 5% market share. The only way to meet that ridiculous sales target is to aggressively target fleet buyers to switch with low low low prices - we are talking thousands lower than Ram, which is the current low price leader. It remains to be seen if Nissan is really going to sacrifice any possibility of profit to gain market share. At some point, it's just not worth doing (and I would argue that point was in 2014 before they sunk all this money into updating the Titan in a hopeless mission to fight the Big 3 for market share).

 

What Nissan should have done in hindsight is to bring over the new Navara (Frontier)... there was a real window of opportunity to eat into Tacoma's dominance but GM got there first and Ford is about to slam shut the door next year on mid size segment next year with Ranger. Instead of having 1 up to date and competitive truck, Nissan will now be stuck with 2 outdated and also run trucks.

Edited by bzcat
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How are they fairing with penetration into the market with the NV full size Van? I remember when it came out, didn't see much of anything of them, now I see them more often, but not nearly as much as the Transit.

 

Transit pretty much sucked all the air out of the van market.

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Nissan has been fumbling along with their truck now for years. This is not even a half-baked attempt to jazz it up. It won't work. If Nissan is serious about the truck business, they're going to have dig deep into their wallets and come up with 2 or 3 brand new products with GOOD design language to drive that business. Warranty aside, without compelling, desirable product, why would truck buyers stop by their shop? I don't believe this strategy will get them just about anywhere.

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Nissan must be giving Amazon a deal on them. I see a lot of NV in Amazons delivery service (And a few Transits too).

 

Amazon delivery van drivers are independent contractors. You need to buy your own van and insurance before Amazon will sign a contract with you. So most of the "Amazon" vans you see are all privately owned - purchased by individuals. Basically they are part of the 10% or so the vans that are sold to retail customers. And that explains why there is no uniform fleet... I've seen everything from NV to Transit to the new Mercedes Metris to clapped out old Chevy Astro with Amazon stickers on the doors.

Edited by bzcat
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