Junkyard Find: 1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R, Maybe

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

You see a lot of early-90s Sentras in the junkyard these days, most of them having become too beat to be worth fixing when something breaks, but you don’t run into a lot of junkyard SE-Rs. The question in this case is: are we looking at a real SE-R?

The spoiler and trunk emblem look correct…

The engine is gone, which is what you’d expect from a factory hot rod in a self-service yard in which all four-cylinder engines are the same price, regardless of vehicle.

But hold on a minute! Didn’t all SE-Rs come with disc brakes on all four corners?

So, we’re looking at a regular ’91 Sentra with an SE-R trunklid, or a real SE-R with a drum-brake conversion. Which do you think is more likely?






Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • BangForYourBuck BangForYourBuck on Mar 06, 2012

    I had an '87 Sentra 5 spd. W/o question, the best car I've owned. It cheerfully racked up 256k mi. before it was rear-ended. :(

  • Randy Randy on Mar 07, 2012

    I was a proud owner of a black 91 Nissan Sentra SE-r (new)... and it had extra tail light inserts that cover the trunk lid on each side of the license plate... I would say this car has badge envy...

  • Rochester "better than Vinfast" is a pretty low bar.
  • TheMrFreeze That new Ferrari looks nice but other than that, nothing.And VW having to put an air-cooled Beetle in its display to try and make the ID.Buzz look cool makes this classic VW owner sad 😢
  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
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