Junkyard Find: 1979 Datsun 210
Back when I was coming of automotive age, in the early 1980s, most of my peers who got hand-me-down cars from relatives ended up with Vegas, Pintos, Colts, and Datsun 210s (for some reason, I don’t recall anyone at my high school getting a Civic, and very few got Corollas). Almost all the 210s are long gone these days, since there’s little interest in restoring them and you can get better fuel economy and reliability from a 1990s Tercel or Metro, but every so often I see one in a self-service wrecking yard. We saw this ’79 four-door in 2011, and today we’ll be looking at a ’79 two-door.
Yes, the 210 was very, very slow, thanks to its fuel-sipping 65-horsepower engine. But look— rear-wheel drive!
This one is pretty grimy, but there’s no rust (I found this car in California) and it would have been easily restored… if anyone cared about late-70s 210s.
Nobody ever got 47 MPG out of a 210, unless it was downhill at 49 MPH, but they did sip gas by Malaise Era standards.
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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One of my HS buds had a 73 or 74 Honda Civic with a two-speed clutchless manual transmission. You had 1 -2 -N -R. It was awful but awesome. It was the very opposite of a muscle car. We could literally out run the car for a block or so.
Does anybody know where this 79 Datsun 210 2dr is in California? Need a rear panel glass, looks like it is good in the pic. Thanks