Last year, Nissan made it clear they have no plans of tapping out of the “full-size” truck game; as they launched an “all-new” Titan XD. Its available Cummins turbo-diesel V8 has brought the Titan’s capabilities closer to Detroit’s Heavy Duty pickups.

And now, in addition to revealing the full Titan lineup, they’ve announced “America’s Best Truck Warranty”; with bumper-to-bumper coverage of 5-years or 100,000-miles for all 2017 Titan full-size trucks.

That’s a big step up over the typical 3-year/36,000 mile bumper-to-bumper protection warranty on most pickups; though some do have as much as a 100,000-mile powertrain-only warranty for diesel models.

That “peace of mind” strategy has sure worked for Hyundai and Kia over the years, and no doubt dealers are looking forward to having an additional bargaining chip to entice customers to jump over to the Titan way of thinking.

The only downside is if you’ve already purchased a 2016 Titan XD; you’re not invited to the “Best Truck Warranty” party.

In other engine news, Nissan will unveil the world’s first production-ready “variable compression ratio engine” at the upcoming Paris Motor Show.

It’s called the VC-T for Variable Compression Turbocharged, and this 2.0-liter engine will arrive soon… in a yet-to-be-named Infiniti product.

In the works for over 20-years; it’s proof that there are still plenty of ways to skin this “internal combustion” cat.

The goal is to optimize efficiency to improve fuel economy; without sacrificing performance. It does this by mechanically controlling how far the pistons travel up the cylinders, varying the compression ratio from 8:1 to 14:1. But the hardware is the easy part; developing the software to continuously and reliably do this-- has taken up the bulk of man hours.

And we’ll just have to wait for the Paris Motor Show to get the full details. So for now, that’s it for this week’s Motor News.

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