This week between Christmas and New Year’s is always a weird one. Nobody quite knows what to do with themselves, and time ceases to have any meaning. Which is good for today’s choices, because if you’re going to drive one of them, you had better not be in a hurry.
Yesterday we looked at a couple of SUVs that were cheap because they were only 2WD. A lot of you were impressed with the Ford Explorer’s condition, but concerned about its hit-or-miss reliability record. The scruffier Nissan Pathfinder seemed like a safer bet, and it cruised to an easy win.
Me, I wouldn’t even consider the Explorer with that Pathfinder sitting there. I loved ours. It wasn’t fast, it rode rough, and it got appallingly bad gas mileage, but it felt invincible. This one, with far fewer miles and the newer, nicer interior, looks like a great occasional-use truck to me. It’s a good thing it’s on the other side of the country, actually.
Cars today are really, really quick. Like, stupidly quick. Does a minivan or mid-sized crossover really need to reach 60 MPH in six or seven seconds? No, but a lot of them can. Nobody actually pushes them that hard – as much as you sometimes wish they would, when they’re merging onto the freeway in front of you – but the capability is there.
It wasn’t always that way. Cars from forty years ago were downright leisurely, with 0-60 times in the teens, and nobody really minded that much. The two cars we’re about to look at would be derided as “dangerously slow” by some today, but just on the pokey side of average when they were new. And I’m sure they can keep up with modern traffic just fine, with a little planning ahead. Let’s check them out.
1982 Datsun Maxima Diesel Wagon – $6,500
Engine/drivetrain: 2.8-liter OHC diesel inline 6, three-speed automatic, RWD
Location: Hollywood, MD
Odometer reading: 290,000 miles
Operational status: Runs and drives well
Diesel engines, outside of full-size pickup trucks, never really caught on in America – but that didn’t stop just about every manufacturer from trying them in the 1980s. Some were fairly good successes, like Volkswagen, and others were abject failures, like Oldsmobile. But the vast majority of them were nothing but low-volume curiosities, sold for a few years and then dropped from the option list. These days, when one comes up for sale, it often inspires thoughts like “Huh, I didn’t know they sold a diesel version of that.” And such is probably the case with this car: the original rear-wheel-drive Datsun Maxima.
Some manufacturers, like Ford, bought their diesel engines from someone else, but Nissan kept this one in-house. It’s a version of the same L-series inline six found in countless Z cars. With diesel power, it makes 90 horsepower, which won’t knock anyone’s socks off, but it shouldn’t be as shockingly slow as a Mercedes 240D or a VW Rabbit diesel. It’s mated to a three-speed automatic; the Maxima gained an overdrive gear in the year following this. Despite this, the seller says it manages 38 miles to the gallon. It has a ton of miles on it, but that’s not uncommon for old diesels like this. Those who love them love them, and are loath to let them go.
It looks pretty good inside for the mileage, though I imagine those seats have covers on them because they have seen better days. It looks like it’s absolutely stock inside, right down to the stereo. You kept your cassettes, right? This car is also of the correct age to have been available with Nissan’s talking message center. I wonder if this one has it, and if it still works?
It looks good outside, but there is a little bit of rust starting to show in the extremities. But compared to cars this age in, say, the Great Lakes area, or upstate New York, it’s pretty much pristine. The wire wheel covers are a nice period touch, and they show how far Nissan was willing to go to cater to American tastes with this car.
1986 Chevrolet Celebrity Wagon – $7,000
Engine/drivetrain: 2.5-liter OHV inline 4, three-speed automatic, FWD
Location: El Cajon, CA
Odometer reading: 102,000 miles
Operational status: “Just hop in and drive.”
If you were around in 1986, you probably remember that every road, every suburban neighborhood, and every mall parking lot was absolutely lousy with Chevy Celebrities. Chevy’s mid-sized A-body was the best-selling car in the US in that year; this is one of more than 400,000 examples sold. Or maybe you don’t remember them at all. Ubiquity and bland styling rendered them almost invisible. But I bet you rode in one. I know I did. In fact, one of my friend’s moms had a Celebrity wagon exactly like this one.
Powering this box of nostalgia is our old friend the Iron Duke – sorry, Tech IV – four-cylinder, a cast-iron, overhead valve dinosaur from a time when 92 horsepower was enough for a family to get around. What it lacks in alacrity, it makes up for in toughness; these things are hard to kill. And except for being a bit unrefined and noisy, they actually ran pretty well. The transmission is GM’s three-speed TH125C, nothing special, but it works well enough. The seller says this one runs and drives great, and is ready for its new owner.
It’s a blast from the past inside as well, with a bench seat, a column-mounted shifter, and a wide rectangular speedometer that only goes to 85. That’s all right; chances are the car can’t do more than that anyway. It’s all in very good condition, and the seller says everything works. Oh, and from the looks of it, this one has the rearward-facing “way back” seat, as well.
Outside, it’s just about flawless, or as close to it as a 1980s GM product ever got. A few odd panel gaps were just part of the experience back then. It’s got all four factory wheel covers, and nice whitewall tires for the full Reagan-era effect.
I know already that I’m going to get a lot of complaints about the price of these. But I’ll tell you what – today, as a late Christmas present, your fake internet dollars are on me. You can pretend to have either of these you want, my treat. How’s that for a deal?
Spent a lot of time in whatever the oldsmobile equivalent of that Chevy wagon is when I was a kid. It was boring but comfy. That one looks clean, I’d do it.
Same. Maybe it was Pontiac? No idea. I do remember the family member behind the wheel was a menace on the road
That would have been a Cutlass Ciera. Or as it came to be widely nicknamed, “Gutless Ciera”…
The most compelling aspect of the Chevy is the column shifter. I wish modern cars would bring that back!
I’m with you on that one. Frees up the center space for a bench seat.
I don’t like the price on either. At $6-7k for an automatic wagon (neither is exactly an enthusiast vehicle), I expect reliability, so I would take the Celebrity for its condition and because I know I can keep an iron duke on the road. I once rode in a celebrity that was folded in half from rust and the floor would scrape on the road, in hindsight pretty scary, but I was in college and needed beer and that was all that was available.
Price is insane for either. Gun to head I take the diesel because my mother had platform mate to the celebrity and it was trash (Buick century). Went through multiple steering racks in the first 100k miles.
Underpowered is an understatement. 16 year old me determined its top speed was 83 miles per hour with a little help from the police radar. It felt like it was about to come apart at that speed. I bet my friends that it wouldn’t do the 85 max on the speedometer. Won the bet but lost my license.
I’m not a member of the oil burner brigade so a high mileage 90hp Datsun with an unappealing interior is neither interesting nor wise to me.
I vote for the Iron Puke-a-saurus. That’s in great shape and with a third of the miles it seems a no-brainer.
Although no one with a brain would spend $6500-7000 on either of these unless it was to buy nostalgia with play money.
Datsun. The Chevy is clean, but I can’t even pretend to have any interest in it despite my love of wagons. The price of both is crazy, but I’d rather have the diesel than spend another minute in one of those garbage A-bodies that a bunch of my friends had at various points in their lives.
The Chevy product will reward you with one of the most buzzing and vibrating power trains ever conceived. Go for it masochists of the world.
The Duke defines NHV.
The smarter choice is the Chevy. It’s got lower miles, will likely be more reliable, and parts will be easier to find.
But I followed my heart and chose the weird diesel wagon.
At those prices? Neither.
I have a soft spot for the Celebrity (oh, look, yet another gm in the Showdown) as my maternal grandmother had one probably since new until she passed during the pandemic, and it was that same or similar color. It was just a sedan, though, and I don’t think I ever rode in it. I didn’t even really even care about it enough to learn what spec it was. The listed example here has a 4-cylinder which is meh, and other being in seemingly good shape and a wagon has no appeal.
The Datsun has some character. The diseasel isn’t a deal-breaker, and nor is the mileage, per se, but the powertrain would probably be the first thing I’d look to modernize if the car were mine. But it’s probably 2-3x more than I’d want to pay, as the listed price is what I’d consider one in the same condition and mileage as the Celebrity to fetch if it had just had a powertrain overhaul.
For context, there’s a V8 Volvo long roof with almost 200k miles and needing some powertrain work listed in my area for $1500 which has much more appeal than both of these combined. It also has airbags for all passengers. So I could buy 3-4 of those for the price of one of these, or 2 of those plus all the parts and labor to fix them. I know that’s not the point of the Showdown, per se, but these prices just seem insane.
The lack of a third-row seat on the Celebrity – evidenced by the absence of flip-out rearmost sections of the quarter window that were included when it was ordered – is the only thing that dampens the nostalgia factor of it. No woodgrain side paneling either but that was nowhere near as common on Celebs than on Buick-Olds A wagons or Mopar K-wagons, and on its’ way out anyway.
Yep, our family ’86 Celebrity wagon had the third-row, the vent windows are the tell. It also had a tailgate spoiler, the 2.8 V6, and the Eurosport package. We were high-rollers, I guess. Between that, the ’84 Cavalier, the ’89 S-10 Blazer, and the ’87 El Camino I learned to drive in, a Chevy of this era, no matter how objectively terrible, is an easy nostalgia vote for me.
Growing up, our family had a 88 Celebrity with the Iron Duke. It was the eternal cockroach. It just kept going and going. It was the only thing in the yard to start in the middle of a Nebraska winter at -25F. It got used to jump start other, newer vehicles and construction equipment. The narrow tires would dig through snow that newer vehicles with wider wheels could not. The heater in that thing was amazing. “Beater with a heater!” It moved me to college and back many times. It was driven to the salvage yard with rusted out motor mounts at 425,000 miles. Certainly no speed champ, but once you got it up to 70 mph, it would hold that speed all day.
Parts are plentiful and cheap. The $7500 entry price is a bit steep. A sentimental Celebrity pick.
I had a hand-me-down 1985 Celebrity wagon. That car was an abject nightmare to keep running.
Give me the Maxima baby! I’ll keep that clattering along for another 40 years!
My FIL had the Buick version of this Chevy, with the V6. He absolutely effing loved that car, drove it for over 26 years. We had to beg him to finally sell it, even with obvious transmission failure imminent. His famous quote was always: ” It don’t use no oil” (think in a NC regional accent).
Neither do anything for me, but I’ll always pick a Datsun over an American car.
7 grand is not too much for a Celebrity in this condition. Where are you gonna find another one?
My FIL had this gen Maxima, and it was a tank. But it was gas, and I’m gas, so I’ll take the Iron Puke because at least it’s the updated TBI version.
I have no idea because I never have, and never will, look for one. As has been said on SBSD many a time, rarity doesn’t always equal valuable.
But there some people out there who want one, whether because they had one, or their parents did, or they lost their virginity in one, or whatever.
It only takes two bidders to drive up the price.
I had the Oldsmobile version of this with the same Iron Duke 4 cylinder. It was slow and gutless but it was mostly reliable and comfortable. It gets my vote.
A buddy of mine in high school had that one – his had the fake wood paneling and normal gauges!
I’d have bought the Olds as new for the gauge pack alone. Best of the clones.
Serial Mom car for me
Good god at those prices. The sellers must have overheard someone saying wagons are fashionable right now. I’ll go with the Datsun because I find it more interesting than the cleaner Chevy.
Maxima all the way. RWD diesel wagon? Yes please.
Also I would probably be crazy enough to try and boost that engine until it blew, then swap in an SR or RB engine with a manual trans and have one glorious RWD Nissan wagon.
I’ll take the Celebrity, but if only for misplaced nostalgia. It was my first car, though my parents were hip enough to at least get the Eurosport. But indifferent assembly and build quality is definitely part of the experience – by the time it worked its way to me, there were literal holes in the rocker panels from poor rustproofing. I spent my teenage summers trying to polish that turd as best I could.
That Celebrity is cleaner than Christian Metal.
From the factory, they had horrible orange-peel paint, bad panel gaps, and yet people bought them in droves.
These were the standard bearers; what GM thought the automobile should become for the ’80s. Heavily based on the X-Body, which set the mold, the A-bodies cleaned up a lot of the problems.
They were joyless affairs back then, especially in this configuration, but the novelty will be a source of excitement now. Still probably really cheap to keep running.
The TechIV is an asset. You ever try changing the rear plugs on a FWD 2.8? Not fun.
These were also such common vehicles, used and discarded, that it’s a thrill to see one looking so clean, and it’s great to preserve this kind of stuff.
THIS is how we lived, kids, not the weird revisionist visions of a time that never was.
To be truly 80s, you should have just said Stryper.
They really were stretched X-bodies, the problems had already been cleaned up by the time the As went into production, especially the wagons which showed up in ’84 two years after the sedans.
Yeah, I think the Citation II was the revised X-body. Damage done, however.
It was probably before that, but I’m surprised Torch hadn’t gotten a column about just how lazy the “Citation II” rebrand was, using the same side emblems in the same font and same location at the leading edge of the front fender between sidemarker and wheelarch.
I know on my Cutlass Supreme with the 3.1 you could unbolt the top motor mount and rock the whole engine forward to change the plugs.
Yes, that’s how you’d have to do it – unbolt the “dogbone.”
The FWD Volvo P1/P2 cars have a dogbone arrangement, too. I can’t remember if the Ford-based P3s do.
I figured it was something the Swedes cribbed from their GM X-body development mule (Project Galaxy started in the late ’70s – and the Chevy was the production car with the engine bay dimensions closest to what they were doing for the 850).
It’s still kind of a pain.
And that FWD driveline lash is just the worst. Especially when the bushings wear out and the whole assembly flops around.
Everything in my driveway is longitudinal RWD/4WD for a reason. (well, a few reasons)
I love this history. I think I knew, but had forgotten, about the X-car/Project Gemini connection, which makes for a fun automotive “six degrees of Kevin Bacon”-type scenario where I now realize my old Volvo 850 was only two degrees removed from a Lancia Beta, since that’s what GM used for the X-body test mules as one of the only similarly sized transverse FWD cars on the market in the mid-’70s.
Further connection – 700 and 900 series Volvos used Harrison HVAC in a few different flavors. 780s and 760s could be equipped with Automatic Climate Control, like Cadillacs, and the lesser cars used control heads similar to what every G-Body had. And I replaced plenty of blower fans with units meant for 82 Citations w/AC. Direct fit replacement, with a lifetime warranty from Autozone for $20 instead of the $100 for the Volvo part. They lasted about 18 months at a time, but who cares? Return with the reciept, get a new one for free, replace.
Lousy is the appropriate word. I hated Celebrities when new no way in heck would I pay $7K for a 30 year old one now. Both of these have too many 0’s in the price, but I would go for the Diesel wagon.
Check your math – that’s 40 years old, not 30.
Oh god sorry I am an old.
Yeah, it gets me too.
I went with the Datsun. Yep, parts are probably rare and it’s less roomy than the Chevy, but I just like it better. Besides, with all those miles, it’s probably well sorted by now.
Parts are probably not THAT rare. That engine was used in the pickups, as well, and other world markets.
That first-gen Maxima *IS* the rarest of them all, though, so you will run into the unobtanium. And it’ll smell like a Datsun interior – for whatever reason, I remember the way my best friend’s family B210 wagon smelled inside, and every Nissan/Infiniti press car I got smelled the same, even with a gulf of about 30-35 years in between.
I had a celebrity wagon – not paying 7k for that again. Mine at least had the 2.8 FI motor and Eurosport package.
The Diesel Maxima today, just because weird and I like weird/unusual. Both way too much money for my liking though.
Obviously over priced, since 7k is almost what these things were new. But definitely taking that celebrity. It’ll run until the heat death of the universe. And has a lot of room.