A Truck with an S on its Chest

Take a small pickup truck. Give it extra room inside and out, lift it high above traffic, and add a healthy helping of power. Not quite the same truck anymore, is it?

That's the formula behind Nissan's Frontier S/C. And they hope you'll see - and feel - a difference.

The S/C starts as a Frontier 4x4, with a new-for-2001 front end that takes the truck from Clark Kent passive to in-your-face. Throw on performance tires designed for the street. Add a quad cab, fender flares, and bed extender. But you're not done yet.

The definitive modification comes under the hood, with the six-cylinder force-fed by a supercharger. Yet the supercharger tickles your ears without really kicking you in the, ah, bed extender. We suspect the Kryptonite might be in the automatic transmission.

Get it in red and watch the mere mortals make way.

Howl

You don't see too many vehicles these days with superchargers. Since the Seventies, the turbocharger has become more familiar. Both feed compressed air to the engine. But the differences are significant.

Superchargers, like that on the Nissan Frontier S/C, are directly driven by the engine, usually via a belt. Boost, then, comes on smoothly and is proportional to engine speed.

By contrast, turbochargers get their thrust from exhaust gas. This helps increase power efficiently, because you're getting a boost from gases that would otherwise just go out the tailpipe. But because turbos have to wait for more exhaust before they make more power, they don't give the immediate response of a supercharger. Some manufacturers try to get around turbo lag by using two smaller, quicker turbos in place of one big one.

So you can accelerate smoothly, right now, or more efficiently with a big bang that you have to wait for.

Oh, and superchargers give out this terrific howl. So it's fun to sing along.