Junkyard Find: 1987 Nissan Stanza Wagon

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Chrysler scored big in the North American market with their K-car-based minivan in the early 1980s, and the Japanese automotive manufacturers wanted to cash in on the demand for front-wheel-drive (or four-wheel-drive) small van-like machines. Toyota, Nissan, and Mitsubishi brought over the Master Ace, Vanette, and Delica, respectively, and you could get all sorts of little Japanese wagons as well, but nothing seemed able to pry many sales away from the Caravan. So, Nissan took their top-heavy-looking Prairie, slapped some badges from the unrelated Stanza on it, and shipped a bunch across the Pacific. Few bought the Stanza Wagon, which makes them very rare Junkyard Finds. Here’s one I found in Denver a couple weeks back.

This one has just 151,369 miles on the odometer. Practically new!

The Stanza Wagon was a pretty good vehicle for its time, but it was funny-looking and didn’t have as much interior space as Chrysler’s minivans.

It turns out that the Stanza Wagon does acceptably well (relative to expectations, which are quite low) on the race track, as the Sputnik Racing Stanza proved in the 24 Hours of LeMons.

With 102 horsepower, the Stanza Wagon wasn’t the slowest thing on the road in the late 1980s.

Such a happy little crypto-van!





Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Richthofen Richthofen on Sep 06, 2013

    There are two of these still roaming the streets in my town, an immaculate-looking blue one driven by someone at my workplace (huge parking lot so I've not figured out who yet) and a beige one that either lives in my neighborhood or belongs to a student at the adjacent university. Pretty good for a 25+ year old Nissan, so these seem like pretty tough customers. Ugly? Sure, they're ugly. But in that 80's Japanese way that now has, at least to me, something of a cool factor.

  • Canandovq Canandovq on Sep 11, 2013

    It had a 4 cylinder engine, but had 8 spark plugs, it behave quite well and was certainly a reliable vehicle. It was my company car from 88 to 89, lots of good memories from that time.

  • Turbo Is Black Magic My wife had one of these back in 06, did a ton of work to it… supercharger, full exhaust, full suspension.. it was a blast to drive even though it was still hilariously slow. Great for drive in nights, open the hatch fold the seats flat and just relax.Also this thing is a great example of how far we have come in crash safety even since just 2005… go look at these old crash tests now and I cringe at what a modern electric tank would do to this thing.
  • MaintenanceCosts Whenever the topic of the xB comes up…Me: "The style is fun. The combination of the box shape and the aggressive detailing is very JDM."Wife: "Those are ghetto."Me: "They're smaller than a Corolla outside and have the space of a RAV4 inside."Wife: "Those are ghetto."Me: "They're kind of fun to drive with a stick."Wife: "Those are ghetto."It's one of a few cars (including its fellow box, the Ford Flex) on which we will just never see eye to eye.
  • Oberkanone The alternative is a more expensive SUV. Yes, it will be missed.
  • Ajla I did like this one.
  • Zerofoo No, I won't miss this Chevrolet Malibu. It's a completely forgettable car. Who in their right mind would choose this over a V8 powered charger at the rental counter? Even the V6 charger is a far better drive.
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