1991 Nissan Stanza GXE review from North America

I have had to replace the clutch twice. Once at 75,000 miles, and again at 147,000 miles. Cost was about $400 for each replacement.

The starter went out and was replaced at about 120,000 miles. The cost of the replacement was around $150 dollars.

The speakers crackle loudly when I adjust the volume of the radio, no matter how loud or soft it was to begin with.

The front passenger side power window gets slow toward the top when closing.

I had to have the air conditioning freon refilled and two small leaks in the air conditioning line fixed.

The fuel injectors leak. This causes a strong gasoline smell to emanate from the car after it has just been run. Although it has not seemed to hurt my gas mileage as much as I would expect. I still get about 19 in the city and 25 on the freeways.

The front hood bounces up and down a few centimeters when driving at speeds in excess of 55 miles per hour.

One time while driving to Idaho from Utah, the front driver side flare light just unhooked itself and broke loose. It stayed on just by the wires and I was able to put it back on and haven't had problems since then.

It currently runs extremly loud, and has hard starts in the mornings (even though I now live in Southern California where the coldest morning temperature we may see is 35 degrees Fahrenheit.

The transmission is slipping. I would fix this problem, but the quote is for around $1,000 and I'm not sure its worth putting that into a car where something else will go wrong. I will most likely be donating it to a charitable foundation soon.

All said, I feel Honda and Toyota are considerably more reliable and just better overall cars than Nissan. If I were to buy a Japanese brand car again, it would not be a Nissan. This is solely due to Nissan's engineering and reliability as opposed to style and design.

In all fairness, this has not been a bad car. I have put on about 18,000 miles per year and most (I would say greater than 70%) of those miles were city miles.

It got me through college in (what I consider) style. It has a sunroof (which will be hard to ever do without) and great looking alloy wheels. It has great classic sedan looks - I really like the look and design of this car. I would buy a new one in a second if I could combine the maintenance and worry free Toyota or Honda engineering with this car's design.