I pulled this idea from a forum for my previous car. I had an '04 Mercury Marauder. They were limited run. Only 11,052 made in '03 & '04.

Anyways, one of the regional clubs invited the Project Manager who oversaw the development of our car to speak & field questions for the users. It was great. Questions were like 'What were some wishful ideas that didn't go into production? What gears do you wish it had?'
It was nice because we found validity to a lot of the modifications we did to them and anything else the development team had in mind.

I was wondering if we could do the same thing and find someone in Nissan to invite to the forums. I'd certainly like to hear some gen1>gen2 comments, offroad concepts that did/didn't get put into production, and anything else we could think to ask.

Anyone like the idea? Would anyone have any ties or ideas on where to start? I wouldn't know where to begin.
nissannews.com

Didn't Nissan reps go to GoneMoab and GOX? I think I saw video of them somewhere, not sure who took it.

Yea, and we meet with them when we do the Smyrna plant tour.

They have been good at listening... if not implementing.

Good idea in theory, but I have a feeling that someone could turn a thread into a flame war with a Nissan engineer...and that would be bad...very bad.

Certainly no one XOC would ever start a flame war on this friendly forum.

I dunno.... I'd say that many of the wishes expressed in the "what we'd like to see in the '05" thread were implemented. It might well have had nothing to do with our thread... but I was floored when they put a locker in it.

That was awesome.

It would have been better if they didn't put the locker in a crap axle, stuck to 6on5.5" bolt pattern, kept the ground clearance higher, kep the axle ratios lower, and made the wheelwell openings bigger. Lots of other things could be better, but I guess overall they didn't mess up the formula too bad.

I think you may be right on that one. The overall attitude of my previous cars forums was quite a bit different, due to the uniqueness of what we had. They didn't tolerate flaming at all, the forums had bad language filtered out by design, and the community was more into solving problems than creating ones... and we had only one main forum for the car, so people didn't want it to go bad.
There are many forums for XTerras, but so far this is the biggest I know of. I could see people being disrespectful on any one of the XTerra forums because they could easily leave & jump on another w/o any regard of turning one forum into crap.
So far I've had a good impression of XOC so I thought it might be a site where this idea could be done.

Ultimately, the market will show what needs to be done. A bunch of XTerra enthusiasts who want to build off-road orientied vehicles should probably talk to businesses who specialize in that. Let's leave it up to Nissan to produce cheap cars that can be modified

I think the biggest difference in the original poster's example is that the Marauder was a limited production/specialty vehicle with a single purpose (fast, roomy sedan).

The Xterra is a more general purpose, high production mass market vehicle that caters to the highest sales prospectives. Regardless of the marketing of the Xterra to the outdoor enthusiast, the majority of Xterra sales are to those whose idea of getting outdoors is driving around town.