Junkyard Find: 1996 Nissan Maxima GXE, With Five-Speed
The Maxima has been with us since the 1981 Datsun 810 Maxima, which became the Datsun Maxima, then the Datsun Maxima by Nissan, and finally the Nissan Maxima.
Starting out as a Z-car-based sporty sedan, it grew into an electronic-gadget-packed luxury sedan, then became bigger, more powerful, and less crazy with each successive generation until we arrived at the current competent-but-not-particularly-exciting Maxima.
The fifth-generation Maxima, made for the 1994 through 1999 model years, seems to be the last for which the manual-transmission option was selected by a significant minority of buyers; you could get one after 1999, but I never see anything but automatics in my junkyard travels.
Here’s a mean-looking ’96 that I spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yard.
This is the first post-second-generation Maxima I have photographed for this series; prior to today, we have seen this ’81 Datsun 810 Maxima, this ’82 Datsun Maxima, this 1984 Nissan Maxima, this 1985 Nissan Maxima, and this 1986 Nissan Maxima station wagon.
I have ridden in a couple of fifth-generation Maximas, but I can’t recall whether Nissan kept the once-futuristic voice announcements that far into the 1990s. The phonograph-based Voice Warning System used in the 1981-1984 models was so science-fictiony that Nissan recreated the system using digital hardware and samples of the same announcements for the mid-to-late-1980s Maxima.
The VQ30 3.0-liter V6 made an impressive-for-the-mid-90s 190 horsepower, and this car could run well into the 15s in the quarter-mile. The GXE was the base trim level, and it listed for $20,999 — more than ten grand cheaper than the far-less-fun Lexus ES300. Of course, you could get a far-less-practical-but-much-quicker Camaro Z28 for just under $20,000 in 1996, but there wasn’t much overlap between Maxima and Camaro shoppers.
This car has proper Japanese-style cloth seats, not noisy and uncouth leather.
The Maxima in this ad has an automatic transmission and no evidence of the front-tire-roasting madness you could enjoy with this car. The Japanese-market ads for this car (called the Cefiro in its homeland) were a little more exciting.
The Air Force has the Stealth. Music has Sinatra. Paris has the Eiffel Tower. We have this.
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 still miss my '98 5-speed some days. Only reason I got rid of it was when the second kid came along, two car seats plus a 100-lb dog didn't work in the back seat. Moved to a Legacy GT Wagon, which is granted a bit more powerful and fun to drive but where was something about that normally aspirated VQ...
I bought a 1999 Maxima SE 5MT brand new 17 years ago. It was a classy, nimble, sporty sedan. I bought a 2003 Maxima SE 6MT brand new 13 years ago. It was way ahead of every other car in its market. And it was a great platform for some very effective bolt-on modifications. The Maxima died for me and countless thousands of Maxima enthusiasts with the CVT in 2006, and the absence of a proper manual transmission. R.I.P.