Faults:

The car has, for the most part, remained completely reliable apart from when it was rammed into a wall by a friend of mine. The radiator cores were bent, and because of my negligence the car overheated while being driven in extremely hot temperatures. This engine was almost driven into the ground without any oil changes or air filter changes or oil filter changes. I ended its days by pouring ATF in the engine rather than regular engine oil, which predictably grenaded the engine.

The engine block was warped and therefore it began to consume engine oil. A new engine (CR12DE) was swapped in for relatively cheap and it has been running like a charm since.

Other small niggles that showed up was a ruined A/C compressor, which I had replaced for cheap. A wheel bearing was broken which was replaced as well. A check engine light popped up, which after tracing through the on board diagnostics, turned out to be a faulty O2 sensor.

General Comments:

I had this car imported from Japan to Pakistan back in 2012. There is no Nissan dealer network in Pakistan and therefore repairs and replacements seemed like a daunting aspect of ownership. However, to my surprise spare and replacement parts were readily and cheaply available contrary to popular opinion.

The car is very easy to drive, very easy to work on and very cheap to keep running at least in my part of the world. It does sort of disappoint in the power department, but it really is not too bad. The automatic variant that I have owned and driven for a better part of 7 years feels very relaxed and sluggish however; the manual variant has a lot more get up and go, and if you value speed per buck I suggest you stick (pun intended) with that.

In short the car does not have any major pitfalls, and if you can look beyond the looks that only a mother could love, there is a very nicely handling, practical, fun to drive little car!

Faults:

Windscreen wiper motor packed up in the snow.

Front light kept blowing due to poor connection.

Spluttering when building up the revs.

Air con not working since I bought it.

Factory fitted radio CD gave up completely.

Trim on door frame where the window comes up, came away.

General Comments:

I bought this car as I wanted something with a retractable roof to take advantage of the great summer weather, and I trusted the Nissan brand.

It is great fun with the top down and doesn't lose any handling characteristics. The roof is easy to retract with just the touch of a button, requiring no more effort than that. Thankfully the boot still retains a fair bit of space, even with the roof retracted into the boot space.

Sadly the build quality is less than I would have expected from Nissan, with various plastic bits pinging off when you work on the engine and the interior prone to stuff like trim coming adrift. The headlight alignment is appalling, requiring me to use high beam most of the time on dark country roads. Talking of lights, the headlight bulb connection was faulty which led to many blown bulbs. The actual process of changing the bulbs is so difficult I ended up taking to my garage; even Halfords couldn't do it. This leads onto the difficulty of servicing. The engine bay is so cramped that even simple jobs like changing spark plugs require removing a manifold. It has three different locations for fuses, one of which is a fuse box behind the front headlight unit that must be removed to change the fuses there.

It claims to have two small rear seats. These are a complete waste of space as I have never managed to get more than one small adult in the back, and even then they had to sit length-ways along the seat to fit in. It would have been better to remove these seats and have a bit more luggage space there.

It's still a better buy than the Peugeot 206/7 and 306/7 drop tops, and more reliable than the Ford StreetKa, however I would recommend the Vauxhall Tigra as a serious contender to the Nissan.