Image: Hemmings.com
I’ve touched on my family’s history with wagons in previous installments, but I’ll add a little more color in this one before putting the subject to bed. As I’ve mentioned, my father was a committed wagon aficionado, with a succession of full-size Fords from the late 60’s through to the early 80’s. So was my extended family.
A holiday trip to my grandparents’ farm was always on the schedule, and when the whole family was in town, the front yard was filled with a fleet of wagons, each representing a wing of our extended Irish family. My uncle Neil was a Dodge man, probably due to his experience as a police officer, and until their fourth child was born, he drove a huge Fuselage-bodied Coronet wagon with a police engine which he swore had an extra hidden gear: Warp Drive. Later, he traded it for a series of full-sized conversion vans.
My uncle Dave was a Chevy man, and always drove a clean, corporate-looking offering from GM, updated every two years–usually a Caprice variant. He stuck with wagons until the bitter end, but never made the jump to minivans, even with three boys. I have respect for that.
Aunt Mary had a Pinto wagon, I think, in the years between getting married and having my second cousin. I don’t remember much about it, other than it was probably green or brown and much smaller than the other wagons.
My grandfather ran his painting business out of a series of beater wagons, none of which were near road-legal and always crammed with the tools of his trade. The last one I remember being on the road was a Chrysler of some kind, eaten away from two decades of New York road salt, so that the driver’s door only stayed shut when the seatbelt was tied around the grabhandle.
Image: Curbside Cohort. Not my grandfather’s Chrysler, but you get the idea.
I wanted another wagon, because I was doing a lot of hauling for marching band and as the construction foreman for the drama club. After the VW accident and the Subaru trying to kill me, I drove my parents’ cars around for a while until another cheap vehicle turned up in the impound lot: an ’85 Sentra wagon.
Image: Flickr/Dave_7. Looking at these pictures I’d forgotten how gigantic the bumper plastic is.
It was a tired example leased by a heavy smoker, which probably explained the bank declining to reclaim it and the fire-sale price we got it for. Blue over gray, it had been in a minor front-end accident at some point, enough to bend the hood and wrinkle the driver’s fender but not damage the frame or engine. After we bought it, I spent an entire weekend scrubbing the nicotine off the plastic bits, shampooing the carpeting and headliner, and fumigating as much of the stink out of it as I could. This was only partially successful, because I would scrub the plastic until it was gray, and within a half an hour it would turn brown again.
Image: Hemmings.com. Gaze upon that luxurious interior…
This was the first automatic I ever owned, and that took some getting used to. As I recall Nissans of this generation were decontented to the point of Soviet austerity; I think I had a speedometer, blinkers, windshield wipers, and perhaps a defroster knob, and that was it. I had to remove a blockoff plate to install my third-hand Blaupunkt deck, and run my own speaker wires along the door sills under the carpet. The door cards were thin plastic vacuuformed over cardboard that I could have poked a finger through. The carpeting was thin and wore easily. Where the Subaru was a solid, luxurious roller skate, the Sentra was a scrawny, noisy slug.
Image: Hemmings.com. The pictured model is swank; I only had a speedo and gas gauge.
My Dad sourced a used silver fender and primer black aftermarket hood, so I spent a weekend pounding out the mounting points enough to get the fender lined up with the bumper and get the hood to close. I got it close, but because everything was pushed to the side, I was the only one who could get the hood latch to release. We never did repaint it, so it looked pretty ghetto in three colors, but it ran, and it was mine.
Image: Hemmings.com. Look at how cheap those door cards are!
It served me well the rest of that winter and through the spring. It had a 1.6 liter engine with a three-speed automatic, and got excellent gas mileage at the expense of being an absolute dog, but that was mostly OK with me. The Nissan E16 engine put out 70 horsepower from the factory, but like the Subaru, lots of hard lease miles subtracted at least a quarter of those.
It was geared completely differently from the Subaru, so the Nissan engine with equivalent power on paper felt like someone chopped two of the cylinders off in practice. The upside of this was excellent gas mileage, which was OK by me. I could haul drywall and plywood and drums and friends. I wasn’t racing anyone. I was saving money for college and knew that every dollar I wasn’t putting in the tank would get me farther away from the middle of nowhere.
Image: Flickr/Dave_7. Almost exactly my Sentra, minus the red pinstripe.
That summer was a lot of work punctuated with a lot of fun, much of which I can’t remember. I drove it and a bunch of my friends to Jones Beach, and all I remember of that trip was how slow it was on the highway and how long it took to get the four of us, sunburned and slightly hung over, back home in traffic on I-684.
In the fall, as we firmed up college plans and I got ready to head to art school in Baltimore, I emptied it out and gave it a final wash, and we sold it to help pay for tuition. If I remember correctly, Mom and I drove to school in yet another Caprice Classic wagon, loaded to the gills with my stuff.
I kind of liked the first-generation Sentra. The interior materials couldn’t be any cheaper, but the seats (same basic design as in the more expensive Pulsar and Stanza) were comfortable, and the interior was remarkably roomy for a car its size and time. These were the early days of widespread front wheel drive/transverse engines in mainstream small cars, and the Sentra seemed huge inside compared to the earlier 210 and B-210 it replaced. An oddity though was that the wagon (whose sloped roofline made it look almost like a hatchback to me) had a lower roofline than the 2 or 4 door sedans, and a lower seats to compensate (though not as low as the even lower-roofed 3 door hatchback IIRC). As a result, the rear seat in the sedan or coupe was roomier – you could really stretch out your legs in them, probably the roomiest car in their class. Also, there was a second variant of the wagon sold in the Japanese domestic market and probably elsewhere that used the sedan’s higher roofline and had a much more squared off, wagon-like rear liftback.
The door cards are as flimsy as they look, though typical in late-’70s/early ’80s Datsuns and Nissans – the 710 was just as bad. Note that your car actually has what was considered a “blue” interior, but they save some money by only making the cloth seat facings, carpeting, and dash blue while the door cards, headliner, and side/rear vinyl seat trim was shared with the grey interior. Shades of things to come.
It’s true, the rear glass makes it look like more of a hatchback than a wagon, which was nice. I do remember that liftgate weighed a ton, and reminded me that I had to replace both struts at some point during my ownership, as the factory struts had blown out over time.
Both this generation of Sentra wagon and the subsequent one had that “fast” rear roofline, which made them pretty good-looking cars. Or, at least less boring than the sedans. It was a very similar angle to that of the Audi 5000/100 Avant, which gave it a very slight prestige bump by association.
Cheap, but honest wheels.
My memory could be off, but I think we had one of these as a rental in Norfolk back in the mid-80s when I spent a summer installing HVAC sensors at the Naval base there for my employer. Did it have rear “vent” windows that were operated by cables and levers next to the handbrake?
Don’t remember much about the car other than that one funky detail.
Hi Ed–
That’s a detail I swear I’d remember, but I don’t. You may be right, though; there was something about Japanese cars of this era always having an odd engineering feature or two.
Might have been the 3-door hatchback.
The ’83 Pulsar 2 door hatchback had those. I don’t remember if the Sentra did too but quite possible since it shared a platform, drivetrain, and all sorts of interior bits with the Sentra.
I knew a guy with one of these but never rode in it. My only memories of it are that it looked even more boring in pale yellow and that the hubcaps with the band across them which contained the word “NISSAN” looked like something out of the 40s. Otherwise it was a completely forgettable car even to me who was interested in almost anything then.
I wonder if our own David Saunders took the pix of the one with the red stripes. It appears to be in Alberta, he has/had a green Mazda2 as seen in the background and the Flickr account is owned by a Dave…
These Sentras were all over the place in SoCal, cheap and durable. That Velour probably feels a lot better than the nylon scratchy stuff many seats are today…
Looking at the car Tells how far we’ve come when it comes to safety.crashing one at any speed is highly not recommended.
I love the variety of cars represented in the various COALS. This series of beaters really speaks to me.
Being raised with a family that loves their wagons including a Renault 12, dodge colt, a couple of Subarus and finally a ford escort I can relate. My parents finally moved on to mini vans in the late ninties. My dad still drives a Astro van. But recently picked up an early 2000’s Mercedes wagon as a beater with a heater.
I forgot how sparten those early sentras were, makes my 98 Altima seem like an s class Mercedes by comparison. Although it is the next class up from a Sentra and a decade newer.
As for the slow driving dynamics it reminds me of my old mechanic who used to say “speed costs how much do you want to spend”. At least in your case you didn’t have to pay too much at the pump.
Everyone’s talking about how basic it is, but this is the luxury Sentra.
The car pictured appears to be an uplevel XE model, there was an even more basic Deluxe trim level across the board which in turn was fancier than the base trim that was only offered as a 2-door sedan.
On second look, I noticed there are two cars pictured; the one with black trim around the windows is an XE, so I think the interior pics are a Deluxe.
And don’t forget about the specially tweaked high-fuel-economy version of that base 2 door, with the rear decklid spoiler for better aerodynamics. There was also a deluxe version of the high-mpg variant that was a real head scratcher – a 4 speed manual transmission replaced the usual 5 speed, something about the added weight of the deluxe model’s equipment weighing enough to move it into a different weight class for EPA testing or something so they had to lighten it with a smaller transmission. Of course the EPA rating on the deluxe high-MPG version was worse than the standard model with the 5 speed.
I can’t remember when that stopped being a “thing” – the specially tweaked high-fuel-economy versions of low-buck economy cars that were used to advertise high MPG figures. They didn’t seem to actually sell that many. I guess the Prius and Camry hybrids are still sold the same way – there’s always one trim level that gets better fuel economy than the others.
nlpnt:
My boss had one of those bottom rung, base 2 door sedans. His was also one of the rare diesel models with all of 55 horsepower. I know he bought it new, but never asked him WHY?
I actually like this model of Sentra, it is better looking, just barely, than the 210 that preceded it and the very boxy/squared off model of Sentra that followed it.
There is one still in existence here in Barbados; like the remaining sedans, it’s beige – for whatever reason that was a popular color here in the early ’80s. The B11 seems so dinky compared to the current generation Sentra; I’m sure the March (Nissan’s current entry-level car) is bigger all around.
In all but length the March/Micra is larger. I’m only about 45 miles from the Mexican border in Arizona, and you see these from time to time. They actually look comically tall in relation to everything else. I would imagine the generation prior worked better, because at least it was trying to be cheeky.