This very cool looking Leaf-swapped 1987 Nissan Sunny pickup is one of the official Nissan concepts shown at the 2022 SEMA show in Las Vegas. It was built for Nissan by Tommy Pike Customs and it looks far sportier than the original truck, with its big front apron, oversized wheels and lowered stance.
The motor came out of a second-gen Nissan Leaf, but curiously it’s not the more powerful 215 horsepower unit. They opted instead to use the 147 horsepower motor with 240 lb-ft (320 Nm) of torque, which pushed the Leaf to sixty in around 7.5 seconds. This little pickup is lighter, though, so it should be quicker, especially since it was probably left rear-wheel drive, so it has better traction off the line.
Powering this concept is the Leaf’s 40 kWh battery pack with a usable capacity of 36 kWh. Nissan probably isn’t planning to do anything especially dynamic with this vehicle, given that it wasn’t given an excessive amount of power and a complete reengineering job, like Ford did with the latest SuperVan.
Nissan is also showing a modified Ariya Surfwagon, which is a very bold blend of vintage and cutting edge - it's a woodie. It has teal retro wheels, two matching surfboards on its roof and what looks like actual wood trim on the exterior, all adding up to a very unique looking Ariya, although we’re not quite sure what statement it’s trying to make.
With the Leaf-powered Sunny pickup, perhaps Nissan is hinting that it could offer a crate electric motor in the future. Ford and Chevrolet already offers such a product and there is also a multitude of choices of motors from smaller companies that usually specialize in EV swaps, like EV West or Swindon Powertrain.
When Ford made similar for SEMA last year, the F-100 Eluminator concept, it produced a much more powerful truck, which used a pair of its Eluminator crate motors that together produced 480 horsepower and 634 lb-ft (860 Nm). Ford used this vehicle to advertise not only that you could buy its electric motor, but also that you could use more than one depending on application.
