Nissan engineers in the R&D base in Arizona have turned the Leaf electric car into a pick-up truck for driving around the office.
It’s half Leaf, half Frontier truck. A kind of ecologically minded white van man’s wet dream, really.
Great! When can I buy a Nissan Leaf pick-up truck?
Sadly, it’s a one-off and stands no chance of breaking out of the Nissan Technical Center in Stanfield.
‘We tried to keep it a secret,’ said Roland Schellenberg, Nissan durability and reliability manager. ‘But we have visitors and they come and they see that truck and they go straight to “what is it?” and they start looking at it, and it makes great conversation.’
Nicknamed Sparky, the Nissan Leaf pick-up truck is used to whirr silently around the 3050-acre site in Arizona.
Read CAR magazine’s Nissan Leaf review here.
Built like a prototype test hack
Arnold Moulinet, who is responsible for building some of the Nissan test hacks our spy photographers capture around the world, said: ’We basically got the stock Leaf, and after reviewing a bunch of designs of pickup trucks that we have here at Nissan, we decided to go with a Frontier bed.
‘My main job here is working on rough-road vehicles and rough-road testing. I’m pretty good at taking cars completely apart to the bare frame and putting them back together again to resume testing.’
See Sparky in action in Nissan’s Youtube video below.