What if the entire rear end of your pickup truck’s cabin could fold away to extend your bed length? That’s the premise of a patent that Nissan recently filed in the United States, as first reported by CarBuzz.
As seen in these illustrations (which appear to depict a Frontier or Navara), Nissan’s goal is to tuck away and fold the rear bench flat along with the bulkhead and the rear glass. This design is called a midgate, and in theory, it should allow owners the flexibility to pick between the seating capacity of a dual cab and the extended bed length of a single cab.
PHOTO BY US Patent & Trademark Office
PHOTO BY Heather Raymundo
It’s a novel idea, but not entirely new. For example, some trucks from GM brands in the US like Chevrolet and GMC feature a 60/40 midgate on their spec sheets, including a manually removable rear glass panel. Nissan itself has submitted multiple midgate patents over the years, though this latest one appears to be its most thought-out concept yet.
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Would you actually want one on your future Navara, though? There’s no getting around it: You’re literally opening up the cabin for a semi-open-air experience. Expect the elements to make their way into the cabin—including rain. Then comes the fact that more moving parts equals more cost, especially if it’s an electrically adjustable mechanism. Granted, Nissan doesn’t mention anything about a power midgate in its patent, but it’s not hard to imagine the automaker going for it given the more elegant approach it’s taking to the idea.
PHOTO BY Chevrolet
PHOTO BY Chevrolet
Whatever the case happens to be with Nissan’s new pickup, we’ll get our answer in a few years. With the new Nissan Xterra due by 2028 and other related models sometime after that, the Japanese automaker will have plenty of time to think this midgate concept over.