Now waiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit a minute!

Didn’t I just review a grey Nissan Sentra on these very (electronic) pages? Yes, I did, but it was the 2013 Sentra that I took on a long, dreary trip to Minnesota. I found it to be pretty decent but not quite ready to do battle with the class leaders.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at LAX just two weeks later and found the infamous Vodka McBigbra behind the wheel of a 2012 Sentra in about the same color, with about the same level of equipment. “I’m a #1 Gold Hertz Person now,” she said, “and I thought that meant I got a convertible, not this piece of crap. Isn’t that what it’s supposed to mean?”

“The ways of Hertz are beyond the understanding of mere mortals. Move it on over,” I commanded, with all the authority of a young George Thorogood, “it’s time for a time-shifted comparison test.”

“Can it be time for In-and-Out Burger first?”

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When Alex Dykes checked out a pre-production Sentra in Napa, he was favorably impressed.

When I was given a Sentra SV with just 812 miles on it at the rental counter this past Friday, I was unfavorably depressed; I had to cover 1,380 miles round-trip from Columbus, Ohio to Winona, MN in just 40 hours and I’d been hoping for a Grand Caravan, if only for the way the Stow n’ Go makes sleeping at rest stops a genuine pleasure. Still, this was a rare opportunity: a chance to check out a like-new production car for the totes-reasonable sum of fourteen dollars and seventy cents per day.

Regulators, mount up.

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It’s not easy being Nissan’s middle child. Big brothers Maxima and Altima steal the limelight and even the Versa has upstaged the Sentra since 2011. With the seventh generation, Nissan has decided to completely redesign the Sentra giving it some much needed love. This refocus on the C-segment isn’t surprising with so much competition swirling from the stalwart Corolla and Civic to the upstart Dart and Sonic. In order to compete in this cut-throat market Nissan has whipped up a compact car so big on the inside it’s EPA classified as a mid-size sedan. Did Goldilocks get it right? Is the middle the best place to be?

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Nissan unveils its new Sentra tonight in Dallas as part of its new product onslaught. Objective: Regain market share in the U.S. The Sentra is “the third of five all-new vehicles being introduced in a 15-month period,” as the company is proud to say. Read More >

In response to a comment regarding Nissan’s social media plans for product development, and the revival of the B13 Sentra SE-R, I felt that I should share this nugget of gold with any readers adventurous enough to go marauding in Mexico in pursuit of a well-preserved sport compact.
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The Corolla has been with us since the 1966 model year, the Civic since 1973. The Sentra didn’t appear until partway through 1982, and first-year examples are quite rare (the closest I’ve come in the junkyard is this ’83 sedan). Here’s one that I found at a Denver yard a few weeks ago. Read More >

Although the nameplate says “Sylphy”, this is more than likely the 2013 Nissan Sentra, set to replace the dreadful current generation car.

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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? Read More >

The Corolla and the Civic get all the attention when we think about the Japanese subcompacts that put the fear into Detroit during the final years of the Malaise Era, but we mustn’t forget Nissan’s replacement for the rear-drive Datsun 210: the Sentra. You don’t see many early Sentras in junkyards these days; they haven’t been a common sight in The Crusher’s waiting room for a decade or so. Here’s one that I spotted in California earlier this month. Read More >

Here’s a statement you won’t see at any other automotive outlet – when I hopped out of a 2012 Mercedes CLS and into a 2012 Nissan Versa SL, I felt like I was at home. This has as much to do with my auto journalist salary as it does my love of bargains. As much as I love $50,000 pickups and supercharged sports sedans, my friends and relations rarely ask which AMG product they should buy. Usually, the decision looks a little like the photograph above. Today’s quandary: the 2012 Nissan Versa vs the 2012 Nissan Sentra. Let the games begin.

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Rated at between 21/28 (2.5l, manual) and 27/34 (2.0l, auto), the Nissan Sentra is a fairly efficient car, albeit rapidly falling out of contention with its new 40 MPG competitors. Using a computer simulation, the developers of the “split-cycle” Scuderi engine showed that their unique, downsized, turbocharged engine can improve up to a 35% improvement in a “stock” Sentra’s fuel economy, when paired with the firm’s AirHybrid system. It’s not clear, even after listening to a podcast with VP Steven Scuderi, which engine-transmission combination was simulated as the “stock” baseline, but for practical purposes the best-performing Scuderi engine (tuned to match the “stock” engine’s power) achieved between 40 MPG and 32 MPG combined (around 50 MPG CAFE combined, or approaching the 2025 standard). Or, not. The EPA city test reportedly does not show improvements with idle fuel shutoff (stop-start), but Scuderi’s simulated stop-start system shows a 14% improvement over the non-start-stop “stock” Sentra on the same FTP-75 test. Was Mazda bluffing (it’s since said it would bring stop-start to all its cars), or is Scuderi’s simulation off? Scuderi (which has nondisclosure agreements with 11 OEMs and is in discussions with 4-5 more) says it will release more information next week at the Engine Expo 2011 in Stuttgart, Germany.

John writes:

I need a different vehicle. I need something that is better suited for towing my racecar than a Sentra. I also need it to be able to hold 4 people comfortably. My kids are getting too big for to be contained in the back of a compact car. So any vehicle I get will probably be a 4door pickup or large SUV. I have thought about a F250, a Navigator, or the compromise between the two: the 80′s Bronco.

My problem is I’ve never owned anything other than compact cars. I’ve never had a reason to own a tow vehicle until now. Can you educate me on requirements of tow vehicles? Is an automatic acceptable? Should I add/upgrade any components like a trans cooler or brakes?

Please hook me up like a tow truck.

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The current fiscal crisis has its roots in easy money– on all sorts of levels. But even as the new car credit market goes into deep freeze (i.e. mainstream lenders finally tighten their lending requirements) and the product pipeline is beginning to suffer from serious constipation (as dealers just say no to ’09 inventories), plenty of stores are selling as if the go-go days aren’t gone. This press release from stuttering spinmeister Kevin Nay at Haldeman Nissan demonstrates that sales may be slow, but the pitch remains the same. “Nissan New Jersey dealer, Haldeman Nissan is now offering customers auto deals from $89 a month and with the release of their new auto deal site they are meeting the needs of frugal shoppers worldwide. For a limited time car shoppers can also take advantage of private sale offers. Nissan New Jersey dealer, Haldeman Nissan is now offering customers auto deals from $89 a month and with the release of their new auto deal site they are meeting the needs of frugal shoppers worldwide.” The $89 deal [for the Nissan Sentra] on the site has fine print aplenty– but I can’t read it. Or click on it. I’d kinda hoped the downturn would inspire dealers to clean-up their act. If anything, they’re getting worse.

Nissan's freshly-minted North American sales chief reckons it's time to address the English patient in the automaker's model line: the Sentra. Mark McNabb tells Wardsauto that he's trying to figure out why, why dear lord, Sentra's sales are on a slippery slope to nowhere. And no wonder; year-to-date sales of the refreshed model are down 10.9 percent to 91,463 units. Helpfully enough, Wards' suggest that the Sentra falls between two stools (so to speak). They report that U.S. compact car sales (e.g. Nissan Sentra) are down 4.3 percent, while sub-compact sales (e.g. Nissan Versa) have increased by a whopping 37.3 percent. Is the Versa– up 364.3 percent in the first 10 months to 67,688 units– cannibalizing the Sentra? McNabb doesn't know and doesn't really seem to care. "He says his first priority with the Sentra will be 'to make sure dealers are engaged with the vehicle.'" Nissan dealers actively await McNabb's wedding plans. “There’s a big market here for that car," says Walter Dolan, senior sales consultant at Pinnacle Nissan in Scottsdale, AZ. "But we’re not seeing a lot of support behind the car coming out of Nissan." Rsponding to the crticism, McNabb promises to see “if there’s something [in Sentra advertising] we can tweak to get the car going a little bit stronger.” Anyway, it may be a big problem, but it's not a major concern. “It’s definitely, from a profit standpoint, not that bad,” McNabb said. Definitely. 

Anyone who’s ever watched a canard-laden, sooty-arsed Spec V Skyline blast through a corner like a turbocharged gecko knows that the NISMO (Nissan Motorsports) boys are capable of crafting some serious speed. Yes, well, making a street fighter out of Nissan’s weight-challenged Sentra compact is sure to require some extra strength bippity-boppity-boo. Speedy silk purse, lethargic sow’s ear, that kind of thing. In short, I approached the Sentra SE-R Spec V with a healthy dose of scepticism, cynicism and I’ll-believe-it-when-I-thrash-it-ism.