OK...not really...in fact Nissan vehicles did particularly poor this year with only a few entered and fewer finishing including a number of the usually solid Dessoude Nissans that included the fastest and most capable Nissan driven by Christian Lavieille that was out of the event after only a couple stages.
Not all is lost however!!
A very unique Nissan powered vehicle did finish and was the first ever of its kind to do so.
The #370 OSCar Eo became the first electric driven vehicle to ever finish the Dakar ending up in 77th out of the 78 official finishers with a time that was inclusive of 24 hours and ten minutes of penalties--but hey!! They did finish!
So what does this have to do with Nissan? Well, one couldn't rightly expect an electric driven vehicle to make it through the Dakar at this point right? I mean even the best of these vehicles have a very limited range when driven under the most pedestrian of conditions. So...In goes a Nissan V6 to the vehicle--but not to drive the wheels. Instead the ever reliable Nissan V6 was used as a generator to create electricity with which to charge the batteries which would then power the wheels. Carrying a 60 gallon tank of gas combined with the original charge of the batteries each day gave the vehicle the range to complete each stage and thus through many trials and tribulations (the specifics of which I do not know as I don't speak Latvian) the #370 Nissan powered OSCar Eo became the first of its kind to ever finish the Dakar...website and news release links below that include some decent video of the vehicle in action.
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