Interesting - it was one of the things I planned to check on my drive day, which unfortunately I couldn't make. I've always felt that I'm missing something with how manufacturers think about differential breathers - the "hot air out, cold air in" logic is pretty easy to understand, but the differential that does the most work, the rear, is almost always that simple one-way cap set up.
In the Xterra world, one of the first things a new owner does is to extend the rear diff breather. There are some easy after market kits out there, I ran mine through the frame rail, and up through existing body holes into the rear brake light. Then I put a filter on the end, just to finish it off. The whole project took about 30 minutes, and the whole time I was thinking "why didn't Nissan just do this at the factory?". Double confusing when you realize they did extend the breathers on the center and front differentials to the top of the engine bay!!
Now it would be easy to say this is just Nissan's nearly 20 year old spreadsheet engineering decision, but -the same was true on my 1996 4Runner (with the locking rear diff) and my 2001 Tacoma TRD - all three of these vehicles were "offroad spec" with locking rear diffs, yet none of them had the rear diff breather extended.
Someday I'd like an automotive engineer to explain why extending the breather on the front and center diffs is necessary, but not on the rear. The logic just doesn't track for me.
On this truck, it's not an Xterra after all, I would expect all of the diff breathers to be above the 800mm level; that's the kind of attention to detail I would expect on a purpose-built vehicle, BUT it will not be a game changer for me. Every new vehicle has its quirks, and this one will be easy to solve
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