The Nissan Titan Warrior truck concept is one mean machine

There are trucks, and then there's the Nissan Titan.

The Titan Warrior concept - revealed today at the Detroit Auto Show - is some yet-unknown third category.

With a 390-horsepower, 5.0-liter Cummins turbodiesel V8, the Titan Warrior concept features an eye-catching style upgrade over the base Titan XD model.

Those flared wheel arches and six-inch-wider stance give room for the truck's long-travel suspension, and it's been lifted three inches to make room for 37-inch tires - setting up this beast to do well off road and assure fuel economy ratings not seen since the Reagan Administration.

The Nissan guys call the new look "modern armor."

Though it is certainly a noticeable change over the standard Titan XD, the base model's appearance already stands alone among plus-sized trucks - perhaps a deliberate attempt by Nissan to capture the subset of truck lovers uninterested in the more discrete Ford Super Duty or Chevy Silverado 1500.

Like most concept vehicles, it is not yet known if anything will come of the Titan Warrior.

We certainly wouldn't mind trying out its off-road power. Oh, the places we would go; the things we would run over. Rocks. streams. Small hybrids. Medium-sized villages.

This is not the first big truck news to come out of the press preview in Detroit, however.

On Monday, Honda reintroduced the Ridgeline pickup, taking aim at the US home teams: Ford and GM.