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Electric Vehicle Maker Tesla Unveiling Model X SUV, Live Tonight
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Rest of the Web Says We've gathered reviews from Edmunds.com, Cars.com plus live Tweets on this car. See What We Found »
Rest of the Web Says We've gathered reviews from Edmunds.com, Cars.com plus live Tweets on this car. See What We Found »
As the SUV market continues to fragment and crossovers take over an ever-increasing portion of the market, the traditional body-on-frame SUV lives on. In the case of the new Pathfinder, it lives on in more serious truck abilities. At the same time, SUVs that still offer trucklike hauling and off-road ability are also getting more road-friendly.
subscribeAt first glance, it’s easy to mistake the
Pathfinder for its big brother the Armada, especially if you don’t have an
Armada next to it. The lines and proportions are very similar on the outside.
Pathfinder gets the same upright, “angle-strut” grille as the rest of the recent
Nissan truck family, but in back, there’s a slightly minivan-like chiseled look
with taillights at the side. In keeping with Nissan SUV tradition, door handles
for the back doors are at the back of the doors, halfway up. There’s no
particular advantage of this setup, but it makes for more clean, uninterrupted
sheetmetal.
Moving in the opposite direction of most SUVs, the Pathfinder gives up its unit-body construction in favor of a fully boxed light-truck ladder frame setup that’s basically a shortened version of the Armada/Titan/QX56 platform, called F-Alpha. But, as handling is never a strong suit for body-on-frame utes, the Pathfinder goes to a modern (for light trucks) double-wishbone setup front and back, with coil-over shocks in front and an offset spring-and-shock configuration in the back, plus stabilizer bars front and back.
