Junkyard Find: 1987 Nissan Stanza Wagon
Chrysler scored big in the North American market with their K-car-based minivan in the early 1980s, and the Japanese automotive manufacturers wanted to cash in on the demand for front-wheel-drive (or four-wheel-drive) small van-like machines. Toyota, Nissan, and Mitsubishi brought over the Master Ace, Vanette, and Delica, respectively, and you could get all sorts of little Japanese wagons as well, but nothing seemed able to pry many sales away from the Caravan. So, Nissan took their top-heavy-looking Prairie, slapped some badges from the unrelated Stanza on it, and shipped a bunch across the Pacific. Few bought the Stanza Wagon, which makes them very rare Junkyard Finds. Here’s one I found in Denver a couple weeks back.
This one has just 151,369 miles on the odometer. Practically new!
The Stanza Wagon was a pretty good vehicle for its time, but it was funny-looking and didn’t have as much interior space as Chrysler’s minivans.
It turns out that the Stanza Wagon does acceptably well (relative to expectations, which are quite low) on the race track, as the Sputnik Racing Stanza proved in the 24 Hours of LeMons.
With 102 horsepower, the Stanza Wagon wasn’t the slowest thing on the road in the late 1980s.
Such a happy little crypto-van!
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.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
There are two of these still roaming the streets in my town, an immaculate-looking blue one driven by someone at my workplace (huge parking lot so I've not figured out who yet) and a beige one that either lives in my neighborhood or belongs to a student at the adjacent university. Pretty good for a 25+ year old Nissan, so these seem like pretty tough customers. Ugly? Sure, they're ugly. But in that 80's Japanese way that now has, at least to me, something of a cool factor.
It had a 4 cylinder engine, but had 8 spark plugs, it behave quite well and was certainly a reliable vehicle. It was my company car from 88 to 89, lots of good memories from that time.