Stanfield Arizona - Engineers, especially test-centre engineers, seem to obsessed with making bakkies out of unlikely cars.
BMW's M lunatics tried (unsuccesfully) to keep their M3 pick-up a secret, the Oxford interns who built the Mini Paceman Adventure didn't even bother, and it's known that there is at least one Rolls-Royce pick-up truck on a sheep station in Australia.
The slide-rule samurai at Nissan's Technical Centre in Stanfield, Arizona are no different; tinkering is their game and “Why not?” their mantra. Hence this one-of-a-kind, one-off electric ute that's in full-time use hauling supplies and people around the 1234-hectare desert proving ground.
This is Sparky, a Nissan Leaf battery car with most of the load bed from a Nissan Frontier bakkie (badged as the Navara in Europe, the Middle East and Africa) grafted on to the B pillars.
Durability and reliability engineer Roland Schellenberg said: “We tried to keep it our secret but as soon as visitors see it they go 'What is that?' and they go straight for it.
“We needed a vehicle for hauling tools, test gear and staff around the workshops, and I wanted a project that we could work on together as a team-building exercise - and this was it.”
Colleague Arnold Moulinet took up the story: “After Roland told us what we were going to do, I went home and stayed up till like four in the morning making all kinds of drawings of what could work.
“Then we got hold of a standard Leaf and, after looking at the drawings for a bunch of Nissan truck designs, we decided to go with a Frontier bed.
“My main job here is rough-road testing, so I'm used to taking cars apart to the bare frame and putting them back together again to carry on testing,” he said.
It wasn't that simple, of course, and what you see here took nine months of problem-solving to create, but Sparky is now a working member of the team at Stanfield, a low-desert environment ideal for testing for hot-weather durability, engine cooling and air-conditioner performance, with a 9.12km high-speed oval and four individual road circuits designed to test vehicle durability, reliability and ride comfort.
“It's something that we all put together,” said Schellenberg. “There's a little bit of everybody in there.”