rev up your engines, welcome to my Thursday video where I answer one of you
viewers questions with an entire video, and today's question comes from Harry
Lopez what do you think about the older model Nissans before the Renault
merger, were they good cars comparable to the Toyotas and Hondas at that time, yes
Nissans were better made cars back then, up to the late 90s here's a history of
the Nissan Company to show you what happened, when I was a young mechanic Nissan wasn't even
called Nissan it was called Datsun it wasn't until 1984 that the company
changed its name to Nissan and hilariously enough it cost the company
30 million dollars to change all the signs on their dealerships from Datsun
to Nissan, now those early Datsuns, they could last a long time they had kind of
two setups, the early ones like the Datsun b210 they had tiny little engines, they
didn't cost much and they could last a really long time, lots of my customers
back then, hey they had a Datsun b210 as a car they used in college I had one
customer that had 400,000 miles on one, they were little cars but hey they
could run quite well if you didn't mind a little car and fixing them was a
simple easy job, even rebuilding the engine was pretty cheap, I had a customer with one
the whole engine was rebuilt for like 300 bucks and then it ran like a
clock there were pretty dependable little cars, but if you know anything
about Datsun and Nissan whatever you want to call them, they started to get
into speed, the first real speed burner the late sixties Skyline GTR that was a
little bitty car but it put on 160 horsepower which was a lot for a light
little car and that led to a whole range of skylines, they even made station wagons and
if you know anything about drift and hey a lot of guys love those skylines turn
them into drifter cars, they may be small but they got a lot of power in them you
can also mod them and they were very popular car even today, as far as
I'm concerned first real big hit Nissan had was the 240z, that was the first real
japanese mass-produced great sports car back in the 60's sports cars were known as fun
to drive but they break all the time, they'd leak oil, now with this Datsun 240z
those things just could run for ever with very little maintenance and people
who knew about sport cars were amazed because they said, whoa here's a quick
little car, it doesn't leak oil starts every time and gets pretty good gas mileage
and of course they kept perfecting them then they came out with the 260z
the 280z the 300z they're pretty good sports cars there's no arguing that
they sold a lot of them, so Nissan hey there were the ones that really
perfected a mass-produced sports car, much like Honda when they made just
motorcycles, they perfected the four-cylinder motorcycle before the
Honda 750 made inroads as a speed burner that could run forever, always start and not
leak oil, people thought of motorcycles as yeah they're fast but they're noisy
and they leak oil and they break all the time, Honda turned that on its head they
made a fast motorcycle that could last indefinitely with a little bit of care
so Nissan really started the Japanese mass-produce sports car market as far as
I'm concerned, but the company made various mistakes here and there as
time went on, it was pretty much in the rumor mill that the company it was up
for sale, Ford was thinking about buying it, but Ford had some problems and their
stock went down and that deal fell through, but in 1999 Renault kind of
merged with Nissan, they didn't buy them it's kind of a merger that Renault owns
45% of Nissan or something and Nissan owns a percentage of them, it's a really
complicated deal, basically putting a French car company in the mix the
Japanese car company, now I know some people like French cars I recently came
from a trip to England and a lot of people there drive French cars and they like
them, but in the United States, French cars have always been dismal failures, all the
French manufacturers have tried to sell cars in United States they all pulled
out they had bad sales, people didn't know how to fix the cars, parts were
expensive and hard to get, as far as I'm concerned when Renault and Nissan when they
merged, not such a hot deal for Nissan because
before 1999, cars like the Nissan Altima they're little bitty Nissan Sentra, hey
those things were pretty solid built, they could last a long time but in the
2000s a lot of Nissans started having problems with engines wearing out
prematurely and especially with bad automatic transmissions that would wear
out and cost a fortune to repair, and heaven forbid you buy a late-model
Nissan with a CVT transmission, those have got to be the worst ones that are
manufactured in the world as far as I can tell, they're always breaking in cars
that my customers have, I get many times people come and they'll say what's wrong
with this Nissan and I'll say, well your CVT transmissions going out and
some will say well you know I already had it replaced once or they'll say, gee
I only got 60,000 miles and the transmission is going out already, and
that's the reason I tell people not to buy Nissans anymore the quality just
isn't what it used to be, it used to be really well built cars they could last a
long time you good a little bit Datsun b210, a Nissan Sentra and yeah they were
small cars and they rode a little bit rough, but they're pretty zippy for a
small car could last a long time and their sports cars back then we're
state-of-the-art, the ones today I see many problems with their transmissions and
their engines blowing head gasket, and they have electrical problems and even simple
things like, I've had customers with them that the vehicles were like two years
old and the mufflers rusted and fell off, because look up my 25 year old Toyota
Celica, it's still got the original muffler on it and it doesn't leak and make noise and
I mean they couldn't make one that lasted two or three years before when
they welded it together it was cheaply welded and it rotted and
fell off, and their general design seemed to get worse and worse, on a late-model
Altima I had to change a blower motor, to change the blower motor on any of these
Toyotas normally I can do it in 15 minutes, it was a six-hour job on that Altima
because you had to take everything in the dash out to get to the blower motor
instead of just having it at a nice place with three little screws you take
out and pop the motor in and out, so yes Nissan used to make really good cars but
after that merger with Renault, not so much, and since this is the Thursday segment where
I answer a viewers question, place your own question on the YouTube comments
below and I'll pick the best ones to make a single
video to answer your question, and where else can you find a guy with 50 years
experience of fixing cars to answer your own question with a video, so if you
never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that
Bell!