Junkyard Find: 1976 Datsun 620 Pickup
Did any of the Afghani Mujahideen drive Datsun pickups to battle after the Soviets invaded? Probably, but the Toyota Hilux got all the press. For the same reason today, Malaise Era Toyota pickups tend to be kept alive, while their Datsun, Mazda (via Ford), and Isuzu (via Chevy) counterparts get crushed when they finally suffer some problem that costs more than $200 to fix. I’ve been seeing a steady stream of these Datsuns in junkyard for 20 years now, and here’s the latest one.
This pickup is a bare-bones, non-King-Cab, zero-options model. No tach, all idiot lights.
The L20 was very reliable, though Toyota’s 20R set the bar impossibly high for four-cylinder truck engines.
Remember aftermarket sunroof conversions?
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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I'd love to find a pre-smog "bulletside" to hide a V8 in. I remember some of the truck magazines still had vendors advertising custom parts for sale for these in the early '00's.
Im looking at a 76 620 right now. Needs a carb and has surface rust, but decent otherwise for being under a grand. Im keeping my Taurus as a daily driver, but I need something for gardening (have a 1 acre vegtable garden) and hauling scrap metal with. I like pre-80 Datsuns a lot. I see many 22R Toyotas with cracked heads/blocks. They were extremely bad for that, have no idea how they earned a reputation of being reliable. I had one Toyota owner brag to me about getting 250k miles out of his. I asked what all had been done to it. New engine at under 100k (cracked block/head) and a new head and head gasket at 180k miles. How is that something to brag about? You cant even squeeze 100k out of it without replacing the mufikan engine! If it were a Chevy or Ford that needed all that, oh God, biggest POS ever, but its okay for a Toyota to self destruct time after time because....TOYOTA! What a crock!