1986 Nissan Skyline GXE review from Australia and New Zealand

Diff noisy and clunky, but didn't get much worse over the 170,000ks I put on it.

At some point the heater seemed to be stuck on at about 20% ( I thought the air-conditioning wasn't working!), but this was a minor fix.

Air-flow meter needed replacing at around 130,000. (Around $250 I think).

Some corrosion around the crank-angle sensor connector caused intermittent unreliability, however once discovered and cleaned then everything was great again.

Some rust at 90,000kms on top left of windscreen. Some rust also under air intakes on top of front passenger's feet. This took ages to find and resulting in much wet carpet until fixed. (Tip: remove front left fender)

The alloy head corroded through from the inside out at around 275,000. This was patched up, but not very well resulting in the same thing happening again 6 months later.

An all-round reliable vehicle. I enjoyed working on it and with the full Nissan shop manual it was easy to fix.

The motor was great and I never had any concerns about its reliability whatsoever. I even replaced the head.

I also found the vehicle very easy to work on in that the engine bay was relatively open, the electronic fuel injection computer was fairly simple without too many inputs/outputs so was a good vehicle learn electronic injection on. Parts are also relatively easy to get hold of.

The reason I had to give the car up was a number of things all lined up to cause a bit of a cost blowout:

1) The transmission was starting to slip and miss gears every now and then (my fault - I tend to flog the gears a bit)

2) The alloy head corroded from the inside out again because I didn't replace the coolant often enough (my fault again) resulting in coolant leaking from the rear of the head near the welsh plug.

3) Rust - lots of it around the top left windscreen and gutters - my fault again because it spent its whole 10 years with me outside in the weather.

4) Registration was due at the end of the month.

So I took it to the wreckers.

However, I would definitely recommend these cars. They are cheap, powerful and reliable, and if maintained better than mine (this wouldn't be hard!) they will last well beyond 500,000 I reckon. Fuel economy was pretty good as well.