Faults:

Very slight oil leak.

RPM gauge gets a bit stuck sometimes.

Minor rattle in the front end.

Clutch is quite stiff on first drive of the day.

General Comments:

This car is an amazing achievement by an equally amazing company.

I am an 18 year old P plater, & this car is just so perfect for my needs.

I got it for $200, it was very rarely driven & the reason he sold it was because he was going over to Western Aus. from NSW & had nowhere for it to go. He was also in the midst of a mid-life crisis. I have spent nothing on repairs since I've had it, except for a minor rust repair job a few days after I bought it. &, unintentionally, I found out that it is built to go sideways, & has excellent road holding & handling.

That six cylinder is an absolute gem, & unlike most P platers, I didn't buy the Skyline to "do up", I just bought it completely stock standard (& it's staying that way), because of its proven reliability.

The 5 speed close-gate manual gearbox is an absolute pleasure to drive with, is very smooth, & the perfect pairing with the RB30E engine.

The power steering has zero play, is very responsive, & also maintains enough resistance for a natural steering feel.

The body is very tough & rugged, The boot is nice & big, the cabin space is great, & the dash is very neatly laid out. There is not an ounce or feeling that this car will give up any time soon.

I am very happy with this car, & this is the second Nissan I've owned, after my '86 N12 Pulsar, & I am equally as happy with the Skyline as I was the Pulsar.

Faults:

Slight oil leak from the differential.

Cloth seats very badly worn.

Shocks very bad and had to be replaced.

Tail light needed fixing as it was falling apart.

All the above items were fixed/replaced after purchase at 386,000 km.

General Comments:

Car was parked under a tree in my neighbour's yard for 2 years before I bought it for next to nothing.

This Nissan started first time, and it did not even need a battery change.

Starts every single time, no matter the weather.

The interior leg room is fine, but there is very little space for rear passengers.

Huge boot, and I never managed to completely fill it.

Car is very slow due to its size, and is powered by a Nissan 1.8 carb. engine.

There are a few rattles still coming from the suspension, but there are absolutely no squeaks at all from the interior.

Considering that this car is used daily to transport construction equipment (sometimes with a small trailer in tow), it has yet to let me down!

Faults:

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.

General Comments:

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.