Last week, Nissan unveiled its latest concept car, the Extrem. Although the midsized crossover appears to have some off-road cues in its design, Nissan says they developed the Extrem to be a predominantly urban vehicle. It's clearly targeting a younger generation of drivers, with LED headlights and tail lights, a very cool centrally-mounted exhaust, and aluminum skid plates.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1JdpEl8qVM[/youtube]
The two-door, four-seat coupe crossover is lower overall than the Juke. It's also a full foot shorter bumper-to-bumper than the Juke, but retains the same width as the Juke (we like this!). Nissan refers to it as an "urban compact sports car", but in keeping with Nissan's definition lately of "sports car", the concept has a front-drive arrangement with torque vectoring.
It sits on 19" wheels and performance rubber. We can also see that the Extrem features fender-mounted mirrors (which won't likely see production in the US)... but such features as the wraparound glass, floating roof rails, detached C-pillars and see-through A-pillars shouldn't be hard to incorporate into a production vehicle.
While there's no current plans to produce the Extrem in its as-pictured state, we're guessing that a lot of the design cues will show up in the next-generation Xterra (which is due for a revision in 2014). We're also betting the production version will get the 1.6-litre (DIG-T) turbocharged direct injection engine from the current Juke.
However, this concept lends itself well to a more aggressive version, considering Nissan's recent successes in drivetrain testing from the DeltaWing race car. It's not too much of a stretch to envision a "Extrem-R" or NISMO-badged Extrem with a significantly more beefy powerplant and the Juke's all-wheel-drive system.
For now, it's a damn cool concept that might just inject some excitement into the lower end of the Nissan lineup.
