Official: Nissan Titan to be axed next year

The Nissan Titan will be axed at the end of this model year, according to a leaked Nissan production document, confirming the full-size American pick-up will never be officially sold in Australia.

The news was broken by US website The Autopian, after which Nissan issued an official statement confirming the Titan’s fate as the Japanese brand’s North American subsidiary changes tack to focus on its electrification efforts.

“Production of the Nissan Titan is scheduled to end summer 2024 at our Canton plant in Mississippi,” the statement reads.

“Under Nissan’s Ambition 2030 vision of an electrified future, we are accelerating the process of transforming the Canton plant with the latest in EV manufacturing technology.

“This will support production of two all-new, all-electric vehicles.”

Rumours of the Titan’s demise had been circulating for more than a year now, with international reports published in mid-2022 suggesting Nissan USA’s answer to the Ford F-150, RAM 1500, Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and Toyota Tundra would be killed off within two years.

With those rumours now proving accurate, the Titan has roughly 12 months left on the US market before it’s discontinued in the northern hemisphere summer of 2024, which correlates to next winter in Australia.

The Titan had been on the wishlist of previous Nissan Australia management as long ago as 2017, when the then-chief of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance’s light commercial division Ashwani Gupta said the company was studying the model’s expansion outside North America, whether via factory right-hand drive production or local conversion in the same way the RAM, Silverado and, soon, the F-150 and Tundra are brought to market here.

Nissan Australia executives referenced the ‘changing landscape’ of the local full-size pick-up market earlier this year, but stopped well short of raising hopes the Titan would be released here, despite the rampant success of the RAM 1500 and the Silverado’s growing popularity.

There’s little doubt Nissan Australia would dearly love to have emulated the upcoming moves by Ford and Toyota into Australia’s booming full-size ute sector, but the Titan’s imminent axing now rules it out for our market once and for all.

The ladder-frame Nissan Titan has been produced across two generations in Mississippi since 2003, in both two-door and four-door form, with the second generation bringing a 5.0-litre Cummins V8 turbo-diesel alongside the 5.6-litre petrol V8 in 2016, followed by a major midlife facelift in 2020.

But Titan sales have shrunk from a height of almost 87,000 in 2005 to just 15,000 in 2022, accounting for about half of one per cent of a total US pick-up market that last year notched up almost 2.75 million sales, led by Ford (29%), Chevy (22%), RAM (17%), Toyota (12%) and GMC (10%).

The MY24 Titan is being offered Stateside with a new ‘SV Bronze Edition Package’ and would have been competitive locally with its 298kW/560Nm petrol V8 outputs and 4214kg maximum braked towing capacity – though perhaps not for long given the F-150, Tundra and facelifted RAM 1500 will all feature turbocharged six-cylinder engines offering higher outputs and broader torque bands than traditional big-bore petrol V8s.

Once the Titan is gone, Nissan USA’s pick-up range will comprise solely of the Frontier – a mid-size ute slightly bigger than the Navara in a similar relationship to Toyota’s Tacoma-HiLux arrangement.

Join the conversation at 

our Facebook page

Or email us at 

editor@carsales.com.au