#Nissan

If something is connected to the internet, there’s a great chance someone will figure out how to hack into it. Cars are increasingly connected, leading to several stories of hackers accessing and breaking various automakers’ vehicle functions. One benevolent hacker took to Twitter to outline an interesting hack he and others were able to pull off on several automakers’ vehicles. 

Today's TTAC rewind for your late afternoon perusal is about a decade old. Former TTAC'er Jack Baruth was in sunny SoCal and got his hands on a 2012 Nissan Sentra rental.

Are you finding food too expensive? Do fuel prices have you down in the dumps? Tired of selling valuable bodily fluids to cover the phone bill? Boy, do we have good news. In a world where the average transaction price for a new automobile exceeds $47,000, the refreshed 2023 Nissan Versa still starts below $17,000 – including destination and delivery fees.

In a time-honored tradition of shoehorning a large engine into a small vehicle, Nissan showed up at this week’s SEMA show in Vegas with a V8-powered Frontier midsize pickup truck. Yes, it’s a concept but one can still admire the effort.

Today's used car of the day is a Chris Tonn special. It's a 1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R. And it's affordable.

The SEMA news comes unabated. Add Nissan to the number of brands that took the wraps off some new hotness in Vegas.

Every day I see more dealer markup stories. For example, yet another Nissan Z markup story crossed our internal news wire desk this morning.

Unlike its third generation which had the upmarket sporty sedan segment largely to itself, when the fourth generation Maxima (A32) arrived in 1995 there were numerous new competitors from all directions. In its home market, the American-centric Maxima faded away and was replaced by the more internationally flavored Cefiro. Notably, the Cefiro wore Infiniti I30 styling in advance of its North American debut. In addition to the handful of variants for other markets like the Maxima QX and QX (which both wore Cefiro clothes), the A32 Maxima was also transformed into a very important car for the Korean market. Let’s talk about some business deals.

Nissan is ending operations in Russia. The company has announced that it has sold its assets to the Russian government for a single Euro, which actually sounds like one hell of a deal considering Nissan estimates the decision will cost the business roughly 100 billion yen – or $687 million USD.

It turned out that 1994 was a high point for the Nissan Maxima. The third-generation sedan was just about the ideal mix of driving dynamics, quality, luxury, and whiz-bang tech features. It was offered in well-equipped GXE trim for lovers of comfort, and sportier SE for Sports Enthusiasts (or something). After its introduction for the 1989 model year, Nissan made relatively few changes to its impressive sedan.

Sales were around 100,000 units in its first two years, and then around 85,000 for the next two years. But in its final model year of 1994 the third gen’s sales nearly doubled, to 163,138. It was time for a new Maxima in 1995. It was a generation that branched out to become other interesting vehicles but also started the model’s decline.

The new third-generation (J30) Nissan Maxima went in a bold new direction from its predecessors. Larger, more luxurious, more technologically savvy, and better made than the first two, the third Maxima was the first to cater to the North American market. The Maxima’s sudden transformation was so complete that it diverged from its former sibling the Bluebird to become an entirely separate model. First up today, we consider 4DSC styling.

The new 2023 Nissan Z has suffered an embarrassing setback, with the automaker issuing a stop-sale order for all models not equipped with the six-speed manual. Dealers were informed to suspend sales late in August. But it wasn’t until recently that the world caught wind of why. 

It seems that Nissan is concerned about the possibility of a roll-away when the vehicle is left in park. Interestingly, this issue also cropped up in some late-model Frontier pickups that happen to share the Z’s nine-speed automatic transmission manufactured by Jatco. 

We return to our Abandoned History coverage of Daewoo Motors in the early part of the Sixties. Korea was a newly independent nation still in the process of building its economy after many decades of Japanese occupation. The new Korean government seemingly relied on two tenets in its earliest years: Centralized control and openness to bribes. 

Both those factors were at play when the government handed the production of all passenger cars to a single company, Saenara Motors. Via a huge loan and technical assistance from Nissan, Saenara built Korea’s first car, the Saenara (Datsun) Bluebird via knock-down kits assembled in South Korea. But once the government noticed there was too much capital flowing out of the country, they banned Saenara from buying more kits from Japan. The scraps of bankrupt Saenara were picked up by another company, Shinjin.

After its short-lived first generation outing as a rear-drive car from 1981 to 1984, the PU11 Maxima of 1985 adopted the front-engine, front-wheel drive format the Maxima kept permanently. But that wasn’t the only precedent set by the PU11, as Nissan decided to move forward with V6 engine configurations and leave the inline-six in the past. 

The addition of the sporty SE trim with its monochromatic details, and fancy electronic options like a Sonar Suspension System were both indications of where Nissan was headed with the Maxima. It was a sportier and more interesting direction than its stiffest competition, the staid and conservative rear-drive Cressida. Sales showed what buyers preferred, as the Maxima outsold the Cressida many times over throughout the mid-Eighties. And at the end of the decade, Nissan gave customers more of what they wanted with the very first 4DSC, a four-door sports car.

Nissan finally updated the Frontier mid-size pickup for 2022, thus finally bringing an aging truck current.

But staying up to date isn’t always enough. Did the Frontier suddenly become a much stronger competitor?