2002 Nissan Frontier Se Crew Cab Pickup 4-door 3.3l on 2040-cars

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Dacia Duster to spawn inexpensive Nissan Terrano, will we get it?

When going to overseas auto shows, one can't help but spend an inordinate amount of time eyeballing forbidden automotive fruit. It's often of the seriously rare, criminally powerful and six- or seven-digit variety. But more often than one might think, the genuinely affordable overseas hero makes us swoon, too. So it is with the Dacia/Renault Duster, the cheap-as-chips, hard-wearing utility vehicle. We've often thought that its basic, rugged charms would play well in the US if saddled with a low enough price tag, but we've never seen much of a window for that to actually come true.
But now, Autocar India is reporting that Nissan will flex its alliance with Renault to spin off a Duster of its own, one that exhumes the Terrano nameplate, a moniker once used for overseas versions of the first- and second-generation Pathfinder. The new model will feature unique sheetmetal to give it a familial look, but the interior will be the same, and we expect the same goes for the powertrain, meaning there will be a range of gasoline and diesel four-cylinder engines with both manual and automatic gearboxes and front- or all-wheel drive.
So, does that mean we'll get a Nissan version of the Duster-based Terrano to call our own? Sadly, almost certainly not. Company spokesman Dan Bedore tells Autoblog flatly, "There are no plans to bring this model to the US." Bummer. Even if it isn't ultimately as capable as the larger, long-in-the-tooth Xterra (it's more on par with the now departed Canadian-market X-Trail), we think the Duster's archetypal SUV looks and low cost barrier would win it plenty of fans in our market. Our guess is that redesigning the model to meet US regulations (crash, emissions, lighting, etc.) would be prohibitively expensive, and the Dacia/Renault model is built in some pretty distant facilities - Brazil, India, Romania and Russia among them - making the business case harder still.

Nissan GT-R Nismo 'Ring time makes it track's 'fastest volume production car' [w/video]

Performance cars are fun to drive and all, but at the end of the day ,owners drop big bucks on what are often ridiculously unpractical vehicles for the bragging rights. And when it comes to ultimate bragging rights, few get more publicized than lap times for everyone's favorite stretch of German pavement, the Nürburgring. Enter the 2015 Nissan GT-R Nismo.
After rumors about a 7:08 lap time appeared yesterday, Nissan confirmed has confirmed the news today with video footage of the run, which took place on September 30. The official lap time is just seven minutes and 8.679 seconds, putting the GT-R Nismo about 11 seconds off the pace of the Porsche 918 Spyder - some six seconds quicker than the far costlier Lexus LFA. Some admitted - but hard-to-spot - missteps by Nissan driver Michael Krumm would indicate that the car actually left some time on the table.
With this time, Nissan claims that the 595-horsepower GT-R Nismo is the "fastest volume production car" around the track. The definition of "volume" could surely be contested here, though, considering the small numbers in which the GT-R is sold. While we don't have global GT-R sales figures, this year has only seen 1,063 units sold through October, and there were close to 1,300 sold in all of 2011 and about 1,200 in 2012. While this loosely defined claim will only add to the Nürburgring lap time squabbling, it is no less impressive. Check out the record run for yourself in the video below, which is accompanied by an official press release.

Ghosn predicts autonomous cars on the roads by 2018, if laws allow

Things appear to be going well inside Nissan's autonomous vehicle development program. Until now, the automaker believed that self-driving cars would be ready for major markets like the US by 2020. However, Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn is now speeding up that prediction to 2018 in some places, assuming that local laws are ready to accept the computer-controlled vehicles.
"The problem isn't technology, it's legislation, and the whole question of responsibility that goes with these cars moving around," said Ghosn in a speech in France recorded by Reuters. He predicted that the first sales could begin in France, Japan and the US by 2018 and expand elsewhere in 2020.
The alliance has been among the forefront of automakers working on self-driving cars. Nissan has an autonomous Leaf (pictured above) test car that is licensed to drive on Japanese roads. Renault showed off an version of its Zoe EV earlier this year called the Next Two, that could pilot itself at speeds up to 18 miles per hour, and that the company predicted would be ready by 2020.