Nissan concept to make jump from virtual to reality

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It isn’t unheard of for a car manufacturer to tag team a gaming development firm and create a one-off digital concept vehicle. Just last year, for example, Ferrari crafted the Vision GT whilst Mercedes-Benz designed a rig for the League of Legends world championship. Nissan did something similar with their Max-Out concept car as well – but with a twist: it’s actually going to appear in the real world.

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Popping up on Nissan’s burgeoning YouTube channel is a placeholder link for a livestream which will start in five days on February 1. It promises to reveal a concept car, one in which the ‘virtual becomes physical’. A shadowy image shows only the racetrack-like LED driver’s side taillamp but that’s enough to all but confirm the vehicle being shown on the first day of February will be the Max-Out.

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The Max-Out was part of a quartet of vehicles shown back in 2021, the other three being the Surf-Out, Chill-Out, and Hang-Out. How precious. At the time, they were electrified concepts intended to show where the company hoped to see itself at the culmination of its Ambition 2030 plan. Of the three, this author liked the Surf-Out most, since it was shown as a pickup truck plying the virtual beaches of California. As for the Max-Out, that machine showed up on our screens as a zoomy convertible with a unique side-by-each seating layout. The concept car is likely to retain many of its details since, as a concept car, designers need not hew to pesky things like manufacturing processes or the laws of physics.

But perhaps this isn’t all just theatre. Alert readers may recall Nissan was making noise about solid-state batteries whilst introducing these concepts in 2021, saying they were hoping to realize their goal of featuring them in a car by the end of this decade. These batteries, which would replace liquid electrolyte with a solid layer between the cathode and anode, could be the next quantum leap in energy density for EVs.

We’ll see on February 1^st if Nissan mentions them again alongside its virtual-now-real concept car.