a bit late to this conversation, but I'm glad to see you've made a good decision. Nissans are great. Hondas have better reputations in the states, but in Japan Nissan and Toyota are the top motor companies. Nissans build great cars.
i approve, nitro. good choice! surfer ps. this should be your goal in the next 2 years: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Bent...iewItemQQcategoryZ6118QQitemZ4597841832QQrdZ1
That's a pretty general idiotic statement. How many foreign cars of the 70's do you see on the road? Not too many, yet there's still a lot of American cars still going from the 70's. I have owned many GM cars that I put over 300,000 miles on with little problems. Also from a few posts above regarding 4x8 sheets of plywood, this reminds me when I had a Firebird and building homes for a living sometimes I had to use that car as a truck and 4x8 sheets fit in it with no problem. LOL I even put a cube of bricks in it once when the bricklayers ran short and I needed them right now. I beat the crap out of that Firebird put over 300,000 miles and then sold it on cars.com in less than a week. How much better reliability can you get than this?
Nitro, congratulations on your purchase! By the way, don't get too cranked-up by those EPA figures for gas mileage since they use some totally absurd testing standards that have no relation to 21 st century driving. In fact, the December issue of Car & Driver tells how the EPA figures out those bogus MPG figures . . . Some excerpts: Csaba Csere points out that the highway test crawls along at an average speed of 48.3 MPH and never exceeds 60 MPH. It goes on for 10.26 miles, for a 12.75 minute cycle, albeit with a warmed-up engine and the air conditioning turned off. What's more, the peak acceleration on this test is 3.3 MPH per second. This is the equivalent to a 0-60 times of more than 18 seconds. The city cycle is equally slothlike, they say. The peak acceleration rate of 3.3 MPH per second was established because the tests are conducted on indoor chassis dynos and 30 years ago those dynos could not reliably tolerate faster acceleration without a vehicle's tires slipping or jumping off the device's rollers. When Congress introduced the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in 1975, the EPA simply adopted this emissions test to measure City fuel economy. When the EPA was overwhelmed with complaints in the early 80's, they turned around and decided to modify the printed window estimates by cutting the city tests for MPG by 10% from the actual test, and the highway test was cut by 22%. This approach delivered more realistic numbers to vehicle buyers without affecting the challenge of the CAFE standards. As we all know, these mileage estimates have become a total joke. Nonetheless, a very informative article by Csaba Csere.
I remember seeing a lot of imports in the 1970's. They did have around 20% of the market and near 30% by 1984. Where did they all go? Also I am always looking at Autotrader.com and notice a lot of GM cars with a ton of miles. One recently a 2000 Cadillac Deville with 370,000 miles and still going and looking like new. Currently there's one in there with 258,000 miles. Seriously there's not that many Toyota's even over 200,000 miles there. I'm just responding to a few idiotic comments putting down American cars.
I agree. A lot of this adulation for anything foreign is just snob appeal or the product of reading too many gee whiz car mags, written by tech heads who drive the car for a couple of days and never have to live with it. Certainly Japanese brands have good build quality and fit and finish, and German brands are solid feeling and look and handle nice. Start actually working on them and the picture changes. Parts are hideously expensive, all that high tech can cause problems and be next to impossible to repair. Peppy small engines with overhead cams require frequent and expensive valve lash adjustments, while those "obsolete" OHV V-8's with hydraulic lifters will churn out 200k miles with little or nothng in the way of maintenance. If you want a meaningful opinion, talk to a mechanic, not some guy who has never changed an oil filter.