Nissan (NSANY) confirmed in April that the Xterra is returning — the boxy, go-anywhere SUV that a generation of off-roaders loved for its simplicity in the 1990s and 2000s. CEO Ivan Espinosa shared with Yahoo Finance why the company decided to dust it off, as well as how AI played a bigger role than you might expect from a truck once so analog.
"We have a dedicated product planning team that is constantly analyzing and looking at trends," Espinosa said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. "Now with AI, it's a lot more dynamic, and you can learn a lot more from the market."
Market research and AI were what led Nissan to conclude that "it was time to bring the Xterra back," he said. The company didn't use AI to design the truck, but rather to spot demand signals for a rugged, V6-powered, body-on-frame SUV faster and more precisely than Nissan's old planning process could.
The new Xterra will be built in the US, with a late-2028 launch targeted. It'll come with a V6 - increasingly rare as the industry electrifies - a naturally aspirated V6, though a hybrid option is on the table as well. The V6 option runs counter to where much of the industry is headed, which is toward smaller, turbocharged engines or EVs. But Nissan is betting the Xterra's audience wants the opposite: more displacement with a naturally aspirated engine, something closer to the original's simple, durable reputation.
The truck won't be a one-off. Espinosa said the new body-on-frame platform underneath it will expand across other pickups and SUVs, using what Nissan calls "family development" - customizing the architecture, powertrain, and upper-body parts across multiple vehicles built on the same bones.
"We are introducing what we call family development, in which we combine many parts of the architecture, the powertrain, and upper body parts among several cars in the family to make them more cost competitive," he said. "At the same time, we reduce a lot of the diversity, the inefficiencies in the system."
Sharing parts across a family of trucks and SUVs lowers the cost of each vehicle, which matters more now that Nissan is absorbing roughly $1.6 billion in tariffs and trying to protect margins.
It also fits the broader shift Espinosa is seeking by cutting vehicle development time by 40%, from 54 months to 30, so it can react to market signals faster, rather than betting in advance on what customers will want and potentially incurring losses.
Whether nostalgia and a V6 are enough to make the Xterra a volume seller in 2028 is a separate question - most SUV buyers have moved toward smaller, more efficient vehicles in the years since the original left the US market.