Sometimes stuff just annoys me. Or it pisses me off. And when it does, I usually find myself saying “SERIOUSLY?!?!” either out loud or with the voice inside my head. The newly announced Nissan Warrior concept is one of those things that made me say it. After all, both Toyota and Nissan have been guilty as hell of copying everything from drivetrain to design elements from GM and Ford for the past decade or so. And this new Titan Warrior is no different. It’s way too close to copying the Ford Raptor for my taste.
What makes it even worse to me is the fact that the new Nissan Titan commercial, that Brian ran on the site, is all about complementing and thanking Chevrolet, Ford, and Dodge for showing them how to build trucks and putting them on the right path. If I were the guys at Ford right now I’d be saying “Hey thanks for the compliment, but that is quite enough for stealing our truck…just saying.”
Lets just take the concept itself. If the conversation in the design studio here in California didn’t go something like “Hey we need to design our own thinly veiled version of a Ford Raptor”, then they should be fired for being inefficient. Because if they stood around talking about this for more than 5 minutes, they wasted time. Dudes, open the Ford website and start drawing pictures of Raptors with your grille on it. I’m not a Ford guy by a long shot, but it stands out as pretty blatant to me. Look at the photos below and tell me you don’t see all the similarities.
If you really start looking at this thing close, you would start wondering if this isn’t the Truck of Tomorrow that the feds designed and automakers are just changing badging on. Seriously?!?!
Is the 8 cylinder Cummins turbo cool? I don’t know. Probably. But that alone doesn’t make this thing different. If Ford wanted to put a diesel in a Raptor then all they have to do is the Raptor SD and call it done.
While everyone is bitching about creativity being gone, and all race cars looking the same, the one thing we could count on was that trucks at least had some personality. Well that’s pretty well F’d up now too.
