After about three years in New York City, initially in Astoria, Queens and then Roosevelt Island, cabin fever was setting in. I found New York an exhilarating place to work but an exhausting place to live. I needed to get away from it more than I was able to without a car.
My wife and I did travel a fair bit outside the city, but almost always by plane on long-distance trips. We took occasional weekend excursions in the New York area – the Hudson Valley was a favorite destination – but were at the mercy of public transportation and then taxis (always an iffy proposition in small towns). I rented a car a few times, but doing so was almost more inconvenience than it was worth.
One Saturday, after we once more dragged laundry detergent and other sundries from the K-Mart in Union Square to our apartment via the subway, I was moved to action. New York has never been a good place to own a car but I just couldn’t face schlepping another box of Arm & Hammer up our station’s perpetually broken escalator. At least Roosevelt Island had almost no traffic and a new parking garage directly across from our building.
I initially looked at new cars. Not for long, though. My wife and I were just starting out and trying to put at least a little in savings, so economy was top of mind. We complain about inflation now, but it seemed to have affected the 1990s automotive market, as well. The 1989 Integra I owned prior to living in New York was less than $11,000 new; a new 1998 Celica – a comparable car – was over $20,000. Sure, almost a decade had passed, but I was still shocked by the price increase. So, used it had to be.
Fortunately (sort of), my wife’s employer’s parent company was shutting down because of financial improprieties. A guy she knew who worked there and lived in our building had to move back to Japan. He had a car in the Roosevelt Island garage. Were we interested in buying it?
Of course we were. And it ticked all the boxes. It was a 1991 Maxima GXE – by all accounts a good car – with only about 25,000 miles on the odometer. I wouldn’t even have to change parking spaces. Well, because it was grandma champagne beige with a beige velour interior the seller’s kids had used as a rugby pitch, I guess it’s more accurate to say it checked most boxes. But a reasonable asking price and nearby auto detailer in Queens made it easy to write him a check.
After a few years without one, it felt weird having a car again. I’d never owned a sedan before (nor had my parents), and as befitted its name, the Maxima had a lot of features that used to be luxury add-ons. It took a little getting used to. I didn’t feel decadent but did feel more grown-up, not least because of the bland color combo.
From that point on, we took shopping trips to Queens – no more lugging stuff home on the subway – regular weekend trips to the Hudson Valley and Connecticut, and house hunting excursions to New Jersey. Cabin fever had largely disappeared, but we also realized we really wanted to escape apartment rent that cost about the same as a mortgage payment in the suburbs.
Building on the trend of major purchases, we indeed did buy a house, in Maplewood, New Jersey, and closed on it about five months after getting the Maxima. Maplewood is a lovely, leafy old town – seeing it for the first time disabused us of many of the worst stereotypes we had of the Garden State.
However, we quickly discovered that raging aggression seemed to be a driver’s guiding principle on the west side of the Hudson. A favorite was – presumably still is – the Jersey Turn™, where a driver who’s stopped at an intersection immediately guns it when the light turns green and squeals left in the face of oncoming traffic.
Overamped drivers notwithstanding, the Maxima handled crumbling Essex County and fairly pristine Morris County infrastructure well, was comfortable, and reasonably economical. However, though Nissan dubbed the third generation model the 4DSC (4-Door Sports Car), it really wasn’t. It was far from a penalty box – it accelerated and handled reasonably well by the standards of the time – but no-one was going to confuse it with an M5.
That said, it did feature German maintenance intensiveness in one respect. While the car featured good build quality and was generally very reliable, I’ve never owned a vehicle with worse brakes. Within a couple of weeks of getting it, I had to replace the pads and rotors. That didn’t fluster me. Considering how dirty the car was when we got it, I suspected maintenance was not top of mind under prior ownership. But I had to replace them two more times, in both instances after only 7,500-mile intervals.
It turns out brakes were not a Nissan strength in that era. I had friends who owned a variety of Nissans and Infinitis around that time, and to a person, they all complained about the need for frequent brake work. And we weren’t a random sample. I found out after I’d sold the car that Nissan rotors, in fact, were notoriously quick to warp and a notable shortcoming in an otherwise solid lineup. But in fairness, the Maxima was trouble-free otherwise and I have positive memories of it overall. As I’ve drafted this, I’ve also recalled just how popular the third through fifth generations were in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were everywhere and their owners seemed to really like them. Considering Nissan’s recent woes, it’s bittersweet to think that it used to have such a winner on its hands.
In any case, we wound up keeping the car for about two years. By 2000, it was fairly old – keep in mind that cars improved by leaps and bounds throughout the 1990s and early 2000s – and many newer models were distinct improvements on already good predecessors. The Maxima wasn’t a Minima yet but it was getting long in the tooth, and considering it’s still reasonably low mileage, I hoped to get some residual value out of it. I wound up quickly selling it to a colleague for close to what I originally paid for it (discounting the repeated brake jobs, of course). As a replacement, we got one of the best cars I’ve ever owned, but that’s a story for the next segment.
Related CC reading:
Curbside Classic: 1990 Nissan Maxima GXE – The Four Door Sports Car?
A friend had a Maxima of this vintage. I borrowed it for a few days in the ’90s when I didn’t own a car. It was a handsome car, painted metallic red. It felt powerful and agile. I remember thinking the “4 Door Sports Car” window sticker was a little silly, though. Here in Philadelphia (right across the river from southern New Jersey) the Jersey Turn is considered a sign of skill combined with an acceptable amount of chutzpah. But not in other parts of the country, as I have learned. I got an outraged blare of horns when I executed the maneuver recently in Palm Springs.