Well I heard that sales for the Xterra are down in recent years but I'm not sure by how much. I'm just not sure how much lower sales would have to go before Nissan kills it or turns it into a RAV-4 (God No!) It may be that Nissan hasn't re-designed it because they are instead just going to sale it for a few more years until sales really suck and they kill it. I think future gas prices might determine the Xterra's future.

I would expect sales to be down on a heavy truck based mid sized SUV with today's gas prices.

If you look at the most popular SUV's the last couple of years, most of them are either 4 cylinders (Escape) or at least a car based 6 cylinder with better mileage than the Xterra (RAV-4).

It's just tough for these car based SUV's to beat the Xterra's off road ability and towing capacity. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that 90% of owners don't care about off-roading and towing capacity because they neither off-road nor tow anything.