Me, my 310GX coupe, and my friendly old neighbor, Mr. Karp.
My first COAL made passing reference to my 1980 Datsun 310GX, so I might as well close the loop and write that car up, too.
Every generation has its particular challenges: millennials came of age during the 2008-2009 recession and boomers dealt with socio-sexual upheaval during the 1960s and ‘70s. Well, if you were a broke-ass GenX teen in the ‘70s or ‘80s living in the rust belt of the U.S. and trying to buy a used car, god help you. Cars in the rust belt rusted heartbreakingly fast. Porsche was the first to begin galvanizing car bodies with the ’78 911SC but it was years before that innovation trickled down to affordable cars; even today, cars in rust-prone areas are still too susceptible to the tinworm. So in the ‘80s it was a given that whatever a broke-ass teen could afford would be actively deteriorating before his eyes; how far gone it was was simply a matter of purchase price. Pay more, get less rust.
“Go south, young man,” was the common advice. Just head for a southern state with a wad of cash and drive home with whatever you find. Sounds easy enough, unless you don’t have a car to get you south. Sure, there were shady car lots in Cleveland that advertised supposedly rust-free southern cars, but pre-world wide web, pre-Carfax, how could you validate a car’s history?
And besides rust, the broke-ass teen was also at the mercy of the times. Assuming your meager budget would net you a car about 7 to 10 years old, that meant you were shopping for something from the ‘70s, when emissions controls were in their infancy. Even some new cars back then were prone to driveability problems, as contemporary road tests remind us. Now imagine those same cars after 75,000 or more miles and 7-plus years of age, not to mention clueless mechanics (and would-be mechanics) “fixing” smog controls they didn’t understand.
So picture a triangle with the corners labeled in turn as Affordable, Clean, and Reliable. You get to pick two; which two do you pick? You’re broke, so Affordable is a given. That means you must pick from Clean or Reliable. Being somewhat image-conscious, I tended to buy cars that tilted towards the Clean corner of the diagram. That means the Reliable corner was neglected. And so it was that my first three or so cars were unreliable disasters. Oh, they ran well enough during the test drive, only to betray me on the first cold morning. Or even the first cold start. Maybe a more practical me would have sought out cars that were more mechanically sound but crustier-looking. But I’ve always been very vain about having cars that look presentable.
Jeanerette’s Law of Broke-Ass Teen Used Car Purchasing. I tended to buy cars that fell somewhere under the blue shading.
Eventually I decided the only solution was to pay a little more money for a better car. In 1986 I homed in on a 1983 Nissan 310 at a dealership on the west side of Cleveland. The 310 was known elsewhere in the world as the Nissan Pulsar, previously written up as a CC by Paul Niedermeyer. The one I found was only 3 years old, clean and rust-free. It had a neat party trick with rear quarter windows that could be opened by remote control levers between the front seats. But it was (I think) $3500, which was more than I could reasonably save up at that time.
A 310 like the one I tried to buy at $3500. Photo credit: Reader/commenter Ripple Earthdevil.
So I applied for credit and ran into the reality that without credit, getting credit is impossible. After my first application was rejected, I tried again with a more generous down payment of nearly one thousand dollars. Same result.
Frustrated, I went back to the classifieds to see what my $950 cash would buy outright. Coincidentally, I found a 1980 Datsun 310GX “coupe”, an older sibling of the ’83 Nissan I had to pass on, in the upscale suburb of Bay Village. The seller’s wife was moving on from it. It was sharp: blue metallic paint, with a sort of wraparound rear hatch window that was faintly reminiscent of an RX-7 or a 944. That definitely appealed to me and made it more stylish than the ’83 I had to walk away from. The GX coupe also had weird added-on C-pillar panels and a band across the roof that I guess were supposed to mimic a targa bar, I guess? That was a little strange, given that targas were themselves just fake convertibles. So the 310GX coupe was faking the look of a faker. It’s turtles all the way down!
Not my 310GX, but a shot of the sporty hatch and faux targa bar. Photo credit: Murilee Martin
Inside, there was blue velour seating with maroon stripes, a tach, a clock, a temp gauge, interval wipers and remote releases for the fuel door and hatch. The hood release knob was missing, but the seller generously left a small pair of Vise-Grips clamped to the release cable. In back was plush carpeting and a cargo area light. All in all, as a consolation prize for failing to get the 1983, it wasn’t a bad piece. Yes, there was rust underneath, but the rockers had been recently Bondoed and repainted and they actually looked pretty good. Kids, this is how bad it was back then: While today Bondo is an absolute deal breaker, in those days, if done to a halfway decent standard and not misrepresented as actual sheet metal, it was acceptable for a driver-quality car.
Not my 310GX, but an identical-spec interior. Photo credit: Murilee Martin
Most importantly, the 310GX ran great. Always, without excuses. Minus 10° Fahrenheit outside? No problem, it started right up and after a minute or two of fast idling, it was ready to rock, with no stumbling or stalling. In fact, my 310GX earned the highest honor a broke-ass teen’s car could earn: my mother borrowed it once when her car was in the shop. Respectable enough for an adult with a real job? There’s no better endorsement!
I named the 310GX Miss Teschmacher, after Valerie Perrine’s role as Lex Luther’s moll in the first couple of Superman movies. I don’t know why I picked that name; just an immature affectation of quirkiness, I guess. In addition to cruising around town, Miss Teschmacher took me and my friends to concerts as far away as the Pontiac Silverdome, a six-hour roundtrip that would have been a nerve-wracking risk in anything I’d owned previously.
With only 65 hp, she was slow, and she was also quirky. Besides the faux targa bar, there was the anti-vapor lock fan pointed at the carburetor, and the oddball dogleg shift pattern that had first gear down and to the left, like an old Porsche 901 gearbox. Reverse was up and to the left, and Nissan thoughtfully provided a beeping backup alarm that sounded inside the car to make sure you knew you had selected R and not first. (Funny how Porsche never felt that was necessary…). First gear whined as if it had straight-cut gears, a trait I also noticed on the 310’s predecessor, the F10. Speaking of the trans, a sheetmetal plate on the bell-housing allowed access to the clutch, for inspection I suppose, although apparently, one could change the clutch through that access plate without removing the transmission. Fortunately, I never had to find out.
Of course, there were a few hiccups. The most serious occurred one snowy morning, when a semi pulled out in front of me and I slid into its Mansfield bar, wrecking my hood and grille as the truck driver continued blithely on, probably totally unaware. A body shop took care of the cosmetic damage while I had the bent radiator re-cored. A few weeks later, Miss Teschmacher was back on the road, looking as good as the day I got her.
Eventually, another car turned my head, a 1983 Volvo wagon. Miss Teschmacher would have to be sacrificed in order to bring the Volvo home. The 310GX was the first car I moved on from not because it was no longer tenable to keep her running, but because I found something I wanted more. I got $700 in trade for her, although by then she had well over 100,000 miles. Not bad considering what I’d spent for her and the 2.5 years I had her. I felt terribly conflicted while cleaning her out the evening before I was to trade her in. (Needless to say, I kept hood-opening the Vise-Grips. I still have them.) Miss Teschmacher was the first car I was ever sad to see go.
Glad to read about the Nissan that preceded the SE-R, and to get a better sense of how your expectations for reliability were set high by the 310.
I think that the fake targa bar, although a bit dorky, actually helped with the rear end of this car. It seems to me that this car unfortunately suffered from Nissan’s complete inability around that time to come up ideas as to how to design a car after the B pillar. I do like the Pulsars from the late 1980s that had the removable/replaceable hatches. They were still ugly, but at least the buyer could put different rears on their car when looking at any one version just got too distressing. 😉
Looking forward to what comes next.
Excellent piece – love your humor. “Without credit, getting credit is impossible” – one of life’s cruel ironies. I was also advised to try to find a southern car when growing up in Michigan, without being advised to actually drive down there and bring one back. The quirky styling flourishes of the GX (fake targa bar and all) probably would have appealed to me. And the B.A.T. triangle rings true to me!
I remember those little underhood fans, a sloppy solution I thought .
Nifty little car overall and happy to see you liked it .
-Nate
I saw a couple of them, on the F-10 where the fan would stick on and drain the battery.
Thanks for the post, it’s good to get another generation’s take on their car experiences. I had a long relationship with smaller Japanese motorcycles as a youth, and I later found that Japanese cars were also quite reliable and rugged. I suppose that I was a bit spoiled in that old cars in California generally were pretty rust free and plentiful. That can of lead to the attitude that most vintage cars should be preserved, I never got the idea that cars were disposable, after they were used up. Looking forward to future installments.
I’m obscurely thankful that my 1980s car adventures involved European cars with fuel injection. While I had to contend with rust and broken manifold studs the Bosch K-Jetronic in my VWs was reliable and did not require fans to prevent vapor lock. The Volvo did need a computer after it was submerged but that more of a rusted floor than bad EFI problem.
Oddly we have never owned a Nissan, just Hondas, Mazdas, Toyotas and Subarus.
My dad had a silver one, just like the $3500 car you tried to finance. Blue interior, it was the only new car he ever bought, and kept for 5 years or so. Very reliable, but rust prone for sure. He never got a new car after that one, because he hated how much it depreciated in the first 2 years…..always got slightly used cars after that, just like I do.
My buddy had a B-210 with that shift pattern and it too had the reverse beeper. I thought it was a good idea since I don’t remember it having a good reverse lock out. Pretty easy to do since they have a back up light switch so just have to connect the beeper to that and give it a ground.
My pickup has the same shift pattern and over course no beeper. However since it is a “close ratio 4sp, with OD and Low it does have a stiff spring to overcome to get it into the L/R gate so it isn’t that bad. That said there have been a couple of times where I had been in low and accidentally put it in Reverse when I was thinking I was putting it in first. Since I don’t drive it that much it wouldn’t be a bad idea to add a beeper/buzzer.
Since these were really just a F-10 with normal looks it does share that same transaxle and yes it is designed so that you can replace the clutch with the transmission in the vehicle in about an hour. There is the cover on the top of the bellhousing and a cover on the end of the trans. Pull the one off of the end of the trans and you can pull the input shaft back and out of the clutch. Then pull the bellhousing one and rotate the engine as needed to access the pressure plate bolts and pull it right out the top. Once you’ve done one it is barely more than an hour.
The only car or truck that is easier to do the clutch on is the Honda N/Z600 where the clutch is under a cover on the end of the transaxle so it is a 30 min job.
Less targa than hunchback, these, part-Datsun, part goldfish bowl. And though they are not a car likely to appear at Lake Como concours, at least the Hunchbowl gave them character, which the five door quite lacked.
Despite your one sharing gearbox and engine oil – something that killed many a Mini if at all neglected – I wouldn’t be surprised if this machine is still running somewhere, even if rust-bereft of all panelwork. A Datsun of this era was not able to be killed, even by death.
A nice post. In other parts of the world (like Oz), we’ve literally no concept of real rust, so it’s always an education to be reminded.
My parents bought a new 310 GX in 1980 — exactly the same as yours, right down to the color. It was a perfectly good car in every way — but of course paled in comparison to the new 1970 510 they’d purchased years earlier, which had sold my parents on the brand in the first place. The 310 was soon replaced with a new 1981 King Cab pickup, which served them well into the ’90s until the inevitable rust issues finally claimed its life.
A girl in my law school class had one of these. At that time, around 1983-85, anything from the 80’s seemed new to me. But maybe that was just my 1971 Plymouth Scamp talking. I rode in Jill’s Datsun a couple of times, and all I really remember was how much tire noise it made. It would be awhile before I made peace with cars of the 80’s.
But you are absolutely right about used cars “up north” back then. My sweet spot was cars that made it to around age 10 under elderly owners who didn’t drive them so much. There was much less rust, but then they would not have worked for those who placed more importance on image.
After I got my undergraduate degree, I moved about 4 hours from where I went to school (a commuter student, so my parents still lived their (briefly, only about 2 more years). Turned out that a lady in my very department at work rented an apartment in the building next to the one I was in, and she had a ’79 310 GX Coupe in the very color you show here. It had great standard features like AM radio, rear defroster and of course the nice velour seats (back then velour was a nice change from the vinyl we were still used to in small cars. I won’t give the name she gave it, suffice to say it had a name. We were in a carpool to work with her husband to be, each of us had 2 door cars (seems funny in retrospect) in order to get parked closer to the door which was especially nice in the winter.
Also liked the “regular” 310 hatch. I owned a ’74 Datsun 710 at the time, and was envious of the front wheel drive which wasn’t yet very common, and living in snow country was nicer in a light car for traction. Don’t know why I didn’t consider another Datsun in 1981, but that year bought a used ’78 VW Scirocco. Really didn’t need front wheel drive for long, as we moved to Texas shortly after, but did miss air conditioning which none of our small cars yet had in the northeast, and didn’t quite want to get an aftermarket unit.
My Dad had looked at the F10 in ’76, but was concerned about vents in the hood near the carburator, to him it looked like a last minute engineering change…he bought a new Subaru DL FWD instead. My youngest sisters took up the Datsun/Nissan ownership, having qty-4 either 200 or 240 SX models between them (2 each). My surviving middle sister still has her ’97, bought new….all of them were notchbacks, and all automatic.