Who tosses out a perfectly usable little Japanese car like it’s an old piece of aluminum foil? While this little Sentra may ball up like that foil in an accident and is the same color to boot, there was a time when these things roamed the land far and wide and provided great service, at least near the coasts anyway. But as all things pass, so will this one. Actually, it already has as it wasn’t there anymore when I checked back last week.
This particular Sentra is from near the end of the run, the new B12 generation would take over in 1986 for the ’87 model year, and while the new ones were built in Tennessee, this one still hailed from Japan.
Sentras were big sellers, introduced in 1982 they sold around 200,000 units in each of its first couple of years (first year sales numbers were combined with the outgoing 210 model that the Sentra replaced mid-year). In 1983 the Sentra was the eighth best-selling car in the States and by 1985 it was the top selling import model.
Despite my quip above, they were also considered a very safe car (which is all relative to the era, of course). The Center For Auto Safety ranked it seventh among passenger cars based on NHTSA frontal crash tests in 1983. That seems a little suspect to me, I suppose it has more to do with the test procedure than actually being involved in a wreck with other, often much heavier vehicles.
Regarding weight, the Sentra (in two-door form) weighed less than 2000 pounds, meaning that its engine, which produced 69hp from 1.6 liters of displacement in its OHC engine, wasn’t particularly taxed. Of course, fast it was not, but it was adequate enough. And miserly, with a 1986 EPA rating of 31/38 city/hwy.
Sentras of this era were available in four formats – two-door like this one, four-door, then a two-door hatchback and a four-door wagon. My own memory tells me that the two-door with a trunk format was the most popular (and the least expensive). People still liked trunks back then and this one’s pretty spacious.
It’s actually almost sort of plush inside. Those velour seats have held up well, just a little tear at the top here, and I suppose everything is fairly hard plastic and some soft vinyl coverings, but there’s even a little style going on with that angled stitching on the door panels.
I see the button for the A/C so this isn’t a total hairshirt special, and I miss simple slider HVAC controls like this one has even though I do love the triple dial format as well. All manual, all the time and with just a glance or even just letting your fingers roam tells you exactly how it’s set. Same as the transmission, whose knob seems to be the only thing that has disappeared from this car so far. But what is that thing ahead of the gearshift?
It’s a “PowerVerter” by a company named TrippLite. They are still in business today and it appears they make power inverters, in this case to add an electrical outlet inside the car. I have no idea if this was a common thing, I’ve never seen one like this before, perhaps the readers can help out here? What would you do with it back then in a car? Plug in your electric razor? A toaster? Curling iron? Isn’t that what the cigarette lighter is for? I really don’t know and I lived through this era.
Yes, this little Sentra only made it to 77,000 miles before being abandoned like a burrito wrapper. Shame, that. Note the rear defroster switch on the dash as it was standard equipment but also a couple of blanks of shame for who knows what options. No tach on this base model either, but at least Nissan spread out the other gauges so there aren’t any bare spots.
Just one little crack on the dash near the center dash speaker. The seat fabric looks impeccable, I’m guessing the owner didn’t have much company.
And the back seat, this may be the first time someone has laid eyes on it in several decades, it’s possible it has never even been sat in and almost assuredly this is the first picture that’s been taken of it. That’s a whole lot of gray in this car, the whole monochromatic thing has been around for a looooong time.
Made in Japan, in Zama in the Kanagawa prefecture to be exact. Located about 25 miles south of Tokyo, Zama also houses a US Army base (Camp Zama). Most online information indicates that by this time the Sentra was being built in Smyrna, TN, but this one shows that at least some still came across the sea.
One sole side-view mirror on this one but back then you still got a lot of standard chrome trim pieces all over the car. These days you just get the base model painted black so it all blends in (but you do get the passenger side mirror).
Even a locking gas cap so you could either open it with a key or by pulling the little lever on the floor next to the seat. It’s those clever little touches that people were surprised and delighted by, all without an extra charge. Nissan has a new Sentra out this year and supposedly it’s much better than the outgoing model and isn’t meant to just be a rental fleet special. Perhaps things are coming full circle after all.
Related Reading:
Curbside Classic: 1985 Nissan Sentra (B11) – A Fish Out Of Rodeo Drive by PN
COAL: 1985 Nissan Sentra Wagon – Basic Blue by Idiotking
COAL: 1983 Nissan Sentra Coupe XE – Not American by Adam Dixon
Well, I guess it went there because it no longer was “perfectly usable”.
We were not blessed by the presence of the Sentra, but it appears representative of FWD Nissans from the era, viz, carefully assembled bodywork that used both flim and flam for that essential less-rigid result, styling rigorously refined for maximum invisibility, interiors because they had to, COPD-inspired engines of incongruous longevity, and four wheels.
In sum, cars that almost rose to the level of mediocrity, but fell just short.
I haven’t a doubt there are many hordes of satisified customers, comforted by the Nissan rule of bland predictability. There are also many hordes who eat McDonalds, believing it to be food on the same basis. I cannot speculate that they may in fact be the same horde, but some might.
It must be possible that this unrusted car was not intentionally abandoned at the low mileage indicated, but that the then-current owner could not remember what their vehicle was when they parked it. Most of us have lost the keys at some point: it is quite believable that this person kept the keys but lost the car.
I continue to admire your inventiveness – not to say wintry fortitude – in finding words to utter about certain Colorado junkyard cars for which there are none, Mr Klein.
Your comment was an entertaining way to start my day. Made me laugh. Thanks.
Glad to be of mildly foolish service.
Your comment is entertaining (as usual) but I think you’re being a bit harsh on this poor little Sunny. Seriously, for the times, this was just about as good as it got in the class, only a bit behind the Civic. I drove one for a while, and we had a Civic at the time. The Sentra was cheaper than a Civic, and not quite as refined in some regards, but it really wasn’t a mediocre car. Quite adequate cheap wheels, and rather cheerful, in the way it went about its business.
The Pulsar and Pintara that Nissan offered its Australian customers in that era were distinctly uninspiring. NZ got this version of the Sunny in some body styles – a family member had a light blue 4 dr as her first car in the late 90s and it did everything asked of it with minimal fuss.
I didn’t exactly say it was inspiring. Just not mediocre. There were worse things to be had at the time. Think: Chevette.
It was inspiring enough for me to write about here. And as you said, yes, there were far worse things to be driving around. The market seemed to agree.
I really liked the original Sentra and was very impressed with it when it first arrived in 1982. It was one of the cleanest styled cars ever to come from Japan at this point, and maybe still is. Keep in that five years earlier this company was pumping out rather hideous Datsuns like the F-10, 710, and B-210 – the latter of which the Sentra directly descended from. It also set new standards for interior room and comfort in its class (at least in 2 and 4 door sedan form since those got a higher roofline and higher seats). Take a look at that back seat and how high off the floor it is, with a comfortable recline angle and lots of support under your knees, so your legs drop straight down and your feet have space. Competitors like the still-RWD Corolla, Chevette, and Civic didn’t have anything near the Sentra’s legroom; only the VW Rabbit came close. The trunk was also amongst the largest in its size class. Besides roominess, the Sentra offered great fuel economy, ergonomics, outward visibility, and reliability. Its popularity didn’t surprise me at all.
Tripp-Lite is a big name in computer power supplies and related items; I’ve bought numerous surge protectors and UPS battery backups from them over the years. I didn’t know they made inverters for cars though. These work like the 120v outlets sometimes built into minivans and crossovers, allowing small items up to about 200 watts to be plugged in. High-wattage items like toasters or hair dryers would blow a fuse though. Keep in mind that in the 1980s, fewer gadgets were designed to run on 12v power; 12v outlets in cars were thought of back then as cigarette lighters, not power outlets.
I miss honest little cars like this. And I love the ad – “technology” was what everyone wanted in their cars then. I think it is actually in all cars, but let’s just leave that there.
In defense they never said “high” technology, although some of those things mentioned were far from standard in some other places.
Back around 1991, I briefly drove a Sentra like this one. I had totally forgotten about it until now. Shows how memorable that Sentra was. 🙂
Working at a burger joint, the assistant manager owned the Sentra, which was a dark blue to purpley color if memory serves. Somebody had thrown eggs all over it one day and she gave me a hand-full of quarters, asking me to go wash it for her.
Naturally, I went to the furthest carwash from there I could think of.
From my dim memories of it, the visibility was great and the five-speed shifted nicely. Comfort was so-so but it made my ’89 Mustang with a 90 horsepower 2.3 four with an automatic seem like a rocket. Gads, that Sentra was a slug. Whether it had something bad going on or it was representative of them all, I do not know.
Odds are that one was waiting to welcome the featured silver one at that great scrapheap in the sky. Jim, thanks for the long lost memory.
Passes my test in the British market Sunny version. All controls and steering light to the touch but no personality. These cats were just basic and reliable get to work cars and what’s wrong with that.? Alfersuds were great but if they didn’t start on a cold work day……
There were still a lot of these hanging around until about 20 years ago. Some neighbors down the street from where I grew up had one that started off red, and had sun-baked to a shade of pink by the late 90s, at which time it was still serving the family.
I’m struck by how stodgy, square, and 80s these look. A friend of mine had an ’89 Maxima, and it looked so much more refined and modern than this car. Yet there’s still something very honest and refreshing about this one.
That inverter is quite unique! I have one in my Honda Element that hooks into my solar setup to power my fridge and give me an outlet. I use it to charge my computer or phone most of the time. But in ’86? I haven’t the foggiest what someone may have wanted to plug in.
In Uruguay there’s a law waiving disabled people from paying imprt taxes on cars up to a certain level. Importers, at a time when most cars were assembled here and none were automatic, had found a small niche bringing some units, all of them automatics and barebones. Some of those were these Sunny models. (the car was not called the Sentra here until the B13, and later, when the B13 became almost a never ending brand, they were all called by their B-code). Even though they rusted, they were quite tough for local conditions, and some time later began to be sold to the general public, and formed a very strong basis for the arrival of the B12, which was sold in at least 3 trim levels, automatic, manuals, sedans and wagons. All that in a market that at the time was about 20-30K units strong per year, counting trucks.
I had a high school friend whose parents owned one just like this. Its garage mate was an Isuzu Trooper II. We were fairly frequent and avid concert-goers back then (My Gawd, the awful shit we paid money to see and hear), and while John had his choice of vehicles when it was his turn to drive, more often than not we’d be 5 lanky teens crammed into the Sentra. It may not have been fast or flashy, but it handled well and ate up the highway miles cheaply. I don’t recall it being tremendously uncomfortable for those trips, but since we were all driving absurd things like Gen2 Camaros, Fox Mustangs and all manner of 80’s penalty box hatchbacks, the Sentra was probably one of the more space efficient vehicles in the combined fleet.
Eventually after some beer-soaked 4 wheeling antics resulted in some pretty expensive damage to the Trooper we were relegated to the Sentra completely, unless we wanted to walk.
Maybe the PowerVerter is for charging cellphones. Really. I think these prehistoric cellphones used trickle chargers that needed to be plugged in to a home socket:
…though the cost of one of these 1980s cellphones would probably come close to the cost of a Sentra.
“cellular radio telephones”
“this unique cellular portable made by Motorola, which weighs only 30 ounces”
“eventually seeing people using cellular phones may seem as commonplace as someone checking time on an electronic watch”
“…only 30 ounces.”
That’s 850 grams – nearly a kilo of phone – yikes!
Geez, remember when people drove vehicles just to get around? I wouldn’t mind driving this to work, but I sure wouldn’t want to hit a new Silverado head on in it 🙁
And as always, I am amazed at the non-rustitude of Colorado junkyard cars. That’s what one here would have looked like in 1988.
My memory’s a little bit fuzzy on these, probably because these Sentras are easily forgotten. But I think that ’86 is a rare year, since the redesigned ’87 Sentra had a very early introduction.
I knew a few folks who’d owned Sentras of this generation, and I remember the velour seats were the car’s sole unexpectedly luxury (and the sort-of Mercedes-style headrests).
Finally, I think about 75% of these were manufactured in silver, just like our featured car here.
Perhaps this Sentra died the way my 82 died. Neglected timing belt. Bought mine used at 68k (without an owner’s manual) and ran it to 155k before it snapped. Coming from cars that only had timing chains it never occurred to me. Otherwise a trouble-free car.
our neighbor had this exact car. it went to 500,000 kms and was still running well when he scrapped it. this is of course when nissans were quality cars… before the renault disaster that took a toll on nissan quality.
Thanks for the Tripp-Lite memories Jim. When I was a technician at Indianapolis Cablevision in the early 1980’s I had a model just like the one in your photo in my service vehicle. It allowed me to power a TV set in my van so I could look for problems in the cable system that could only be seen on a TV and not on a signal level meter. Later on the company went with Redi Line motor generators which provided a much higher capacity 120V AC power source from 12V DC.
When my family would take our long spring and summer road trips we used power inverters in the minivan plugged into a mini-fridge. I mounted a small one under my Cougar’s passenger seat to plug my laptop into for datalogging and tuning.
These Sentras were non-existent in the Chicago area in my lifetime. I’m struck by how much they resemble a Maserati BiTurbo
This car has already been featured elsewhere:
https://www.autoblog.com/2020/02/09/junkyard-gem-1986-nissan-sentra-sedan/#slide-2205342
I don’t read those little start-up websites. 🙂
Clearly the car was worthy! He’s featured vehicles I’ve done before and vice versa a few times now. We frequent the same places and I actually ran into him last summer so while it’s somewhat inevitable it is still kind of remarkable on some level. I recognize a lot of the cars he features and I’m sure he’d be familiar with some of the ones I post even if he skips them himself.
I have a visceral reaction to this car, as well as the Omega/Catera, which causes me to drag out a deceased equine and flog it mercilessly.
Ma bought one of these new in 1986/ Same colour, but made in Smyrna. I was 10. This version is not a bad car, with cassette radio, cloth seats, air, and a few creature comforts.
BUT she didn’t get the decent version, she got the horrible hairshirt version of this car, with vinyl upholstery, no air, no clock, no radio, no nothing. A really miserable econobox, designed to forever remind everyone except the masochistic buyer, for a few dollars more, you could have gotten a MUCH better car. Her car made an A body Century look like a Rolls Royce. A Plymouth Sundance became lustworthy.
That trim level was designed to punish the buyer and anyone who rode in the car. It had a grim, miserable feel to it, a designed to strip away anything that smacked of comfort, a designed by some horrible government institution which would repel visitors and lead to apathy and resentment. Some nameless but vaguely menacing agency with concrete walls inside and out, echoing fluorescent lit corridors, staff with polyester ties and polyester short sleeve dress shirts, for some impenetrable bureaucracy designed to churn out red tape. This was a car designed for the joyless, an extra circle of hell for Dante. It defined tin can full of plastic and unlike something like a LeCar or Beetle, which had jaunty quirkiness, or Chevette, of which no better version could be had, this was just CHEAP.
I don’t like cheap econoboxes.
Thanks for confirming that this generation WAS in fact built in Smyrna at all – I wasn’t sure if I believed that when I saw it in my research as this one is Japanese and the run didn’t continue that much longer before the next generation was released, I didn’t think they’d tool up for it just to replace it so soon. I don’t think any pre-86’s came from Smyrna especially as the commercial (for an ’85) says it’s the top selling import.
Sure it was. Frankly, I was quite surprised that this example wasn’t.
In fact, I started to write you an email when I previewed this when you said it was made in Japan, but then I got to the sticker that says otherwise. Obviously they were still shipping some in from Japan too. I wasn’t aware of that.
Remarkable find. A coworker owned a near identical 2 door Sentra around 1987. I only rode in it only once, and the diagonal door panel pattern was my lasting visual memory of the interior. Though the trip was a brief drive to a nearby eatery for lunch, I still recall ‘Lessons in Love’ by Level 42 was in the tape player. 🙂
Love Level42…
The first thing I thought of when I saw the diagonal door panel design on this one were the taillights of the soon to be released 1987 Nissan Pulsar. Foreshadowing?
The extended version of ‘Hot Water’ from 1984 was one of my favourites by them. One of the best early 12 inches IMO. A club hit in the US.
I think it’s such a shame that this went to scrap with only 77K miles in this kind of condition. What a waste. I’m sure that, with a little effort and/or money, it could have gone so much further. This car doesn’t look like it was abused. Maybe the clutch gave out? What did the owner spend to replace it?
This car is very similar under the skin to my ’84 Pulsar, which was a “cheerful”, reliable, even comfortable (for me) little car that I drove everywhere. Economical too, I normally got 42 – 44 mpg out of it, even hitting 50 mpg, though this was during the 55 mph speed limit. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to meet up with a larger vehicle coming at me from the opposite direction, though.
All the posts this week featuring compact, affordable Asian cars have been especially interesting for me. Thanks for this one, Jim.
A friend in high school around 1987 had a 83 Sentra wagon, that thing was a hill climbing machine and could keep up with any 4×4 on the trails.
O, remember the sound japanese stickshift cars from the 70s and 80s made backing up? The progressively higher pitched rrr-rrrr-RRRR? That sound was as distinctive as the highland park hummingbird or an olds v8 but has been lost to history.
They still make that sound, as my xB will attest to. As do pretty much all manual transmissions, as they typically use straight-cut gears for reverse.
I guess you’re not hearing it as much because there’s not as many stick shift cars around?
I believe these had interference engines. Despite the low miles, the timing belt could have snapped with age, trashing the engine.
Should’ve grabbed that Tripplett. Probably US-made.
Happy Motoring, Mark
One common use of the power inverter was to power laptops on the road. Batteries then didn’t last very long. There are other uses as well.
That was my thought as well; perhaps this was a company car of some sort and the driver needed to use a computer on the road. Plunk one of those luggable Compaq/Kaypro machines on the passenger seat, plug it in, and suddenly your little car is a high-tech Office of The Future.
Todavia lo tienen? Me hacen falta piezas de ese carro
Me hace falta esta pieza
This isn’t a base model. Base models didn’t have chrome trim on the bottom of the tail lights, nor did they have chrome at the top of the headlights. Base models also had smaller black plastic center caps. Coming from experience of owning many of these crapboxes.