Most honest car I ever drove.

(edited to include some of Bob's excellent suggestions - thanks!)

I never owned the '91 Maxima that I drove; it belonged to my best friend and roommate. She inherited it from her father when she turned sixteen, so by the time I "met" it it was already ten years old.

I thoroughly blame my Maxima obsession on this car.

What a tough, wonderful old machine this really was. It had a spoiler so I'm guessing it was the SE (it was an automatic); she had installed a CD player and this car took us all over during the first three years of college. It had power to burn, lots of space, and never gave her a whit of trouble.

During my second year in college, I decided to try for my license (I'd been driving with a permit on and off for several years - yes, always with someone else in the car, nothing illegal) and this was the car I practiced in. We have a Volvo at home and the differences were pretty amazing. You could FEEL the power that this car had - even just idling. I'm used to the Volvo's awesome turning radius, but the Maxima also handled very well. I found myself becoming more and more impressed by it each time I drove it.

I got my license in another Maxima, a virtually identical model belonging to a friend. I then took it out onto the freeway. WOW... I'm used to a little bit of build-up before the car hits cruising speed. Not with a Maxima! You say go and by golly that car GOES.

A lot of the reviews here have praised its reliability. I'm chiming in. I don't know that my friend ever really got her car serviced regularly - it never came up. I suspect it may not have happened. The Maxima just kept on going. She reached 220,000 miles on that car before anything went wrong - all original parts! Toward the end of year three it started falling apart - gasket problems, shocks, etc - and she would repair them as she could, but I think we sort of suspected the end was near, barring a complete overhaul. It randomly died on her one day while she was pulling out of a parking lot. This was the only trouble the car ever gave her. I don't know of any issues the car had that were not directly related to its age and the quality of care it received.

Regarding the general performance of other parts of the car: generally I was very pleased. The window-wipers were replaced toward the end.

I am going to admit a glaring weakness on my part: I did not know that automatic transmissions "shifted" like manual ones until I started doing research this summer for my car. Oh, I was vaguely aware of the sounds changing as I sped up on the freeway, but I never associated it with shifting. Now that I realize what it is, I sort of can't avoid noticing it.

(Aside to make a point: The 2000 GLE that I tested had a sort of slight pause/hesitation at times when trying to apply more gas - as though the car wasn't quite sure what I wanted it to do. I've since read that this has happened in other Maximas. It wasn't so much a slight pause before shifting into a faster (higher?) gear - the car literally did not go for an instant when I moved from the stoplight.)

The '91, however, shifted very smoothly as I recall. I don't remember any pauses of hesitations or even undue noise. It just went.

The brakes were very good, as I discovered while taking a friend home. We were about to pass an entryway when the driver in front of us slammed on his breaks to make a hairpin turn. We were going about 35mph, well within the speed limit, but I had to slam on my breaks to keep from hitting him. The Maxima screeched to a halt and barely avoided his tail. It wasn't pretty and certainly didn't feel good, but the car avoided a mess.

The center console, with the speedometer and gas gauge and such, had the neat white backing that was still present in Maximas up to the '99 I'm driving now (I don't recall whether the '00 GLE had it). The lights had started to dim after a long life, but the white background made it easy to read even in the dark.

Gas mileage was still good. Something was wrong with the fuel gauge - it started announcing it had a quarter less than what was actually in the tank (this give us a huge scare on the freeway one day). The gas was THERE - we tried filling it up once and realized this - but the gauge didn't register it.

I can't speak for the sound system; I don't know if Nissan was using the Bose stereo back in '91; I never checked the speakers. Whatever they were, they didn't mind being hooked up to the two aftermarket CD players my roommate installed (the first one was stolen). The speakers were never able to accomodate much bass, but we could turn the stereo up as loud as we wanted and they never failed us.

I do remember a distinct problem with the two Maximas I came into contact with: the windows. One had a back window that simply refused to work... it had a piece of cardboard stuck in it to keep it up. The front passenger's window was never to be rolled down because it might not come back up again. The front passenger window mechanism broke, but did get repaired. The other '91 I drove had a similar problem. I don't know if it was just the bad luck of these two cars or if this was a design flaw.

Speaking of design flaws, the side-mirrors were pitifully small. It really drove me nuts trying to merge on the freeway.

The horn had also breathed its last by the time I met it. A shame, too, it really would have come in handy at times.

I do think that all of the car's various mechanical issues could have been fixed up with a good mechanic... but, that does require money - oftem money that college kids just don't have.

I'm sorry to say that I was driving this fine old car when it finally met its maker. I was dropping off a friend after a party and was headed back towards the freeway. I had three green lights in a row and everything was fine - imagine my surprise when I saw a car turning suddenly cutting across my lane as it made a left turn from the other direction. I tried to jerk the car away but we hit, and I jounced pretty badly.

As it turns out, the other driver was trying to make a left turn... onto a freeway exit ramp. It's been said that by pushing her out of the way I probably saved her from an awful head-on. No one was hurt. Her car, however -- well, I think what happened was when I tried to turn the Maxima out of the way I hit her with the left front corner. The Maxima literally sheared the Toyota's entire front half off - parts of the engine were lying in the road. The Maxima, on the other hand, suffered from a broken headlight and a busted tire. It was about 11 so I couldn't see any other damage. We called the police, I was cleared of any wrongdoing, and the car was towed.

As it turns out, the suspension was badly damaged. We went to see the car at a salvage lot and in the daytime you could see the crunching that had happened. Ultimately, the insurance company decided not to repair it and instead pay off my friend. I felt very badly and still do, though I've been assured it was not my fault and that if I hadn't managed to jerk the car away so quickly the Toyota might well have hit the driver's side, resulting in a much more compacted me.

My father has had two Nissan Zs, an 80s model and a more recent '92 edition. He's been in accidents in both of them and both times he emerged unscathed because of the sturdy quality of the cars. The first one ended up totaled, the second one survived a nasty rear ender that pushed it into a truck - it was repaired. Bottom line: Nissan makes a good, SOLID car. Seeing pieces of that Toyota out on the street while the Maxima looked fairly drivable was somewhat surreal.

Besides reliability, my favorite part about the car was probably the engine. Yes, that legendary V6 engine. The '91 edition had 160 horses and those horses ran beautifully. Being youngsters we liked a car that had a little bit of flair to it... the Maxima had lots of that! She could rev the engine and heads turned. On the freeway, heads rolled. And kept rolling, as the Maxima seemingly effortlessly zoomed past every other car out there. The dangerous quality about these cars is that you can be going much faster than you realize - I have a lead foot, but usually on the freeway I'm very careful about my speed. Imagine my surprise when I glanced at the speedometer and found myslf doing 95 one night and barely hearing a sound!

The interior, though battered by time, was still fairly accomodating. Leather seats didn't always look so great (several cracks in the seat and back) but remained comfortable. As the roomie, I generally got to call shotgun so didn't spend much time in back. The outer seats were fine but the center one - avoid like the plague! We did cram our 6'1 inch friend back there (we must have been angry at him or something) and that was the last time we tried it.

Some of the plastic moldings had started to crack and the dashboard wasn't in great shape, but it still held together.

I don't have an exact size for the trunk - my '99 has 14.6 cubic feet, so I'm guessing it may have been less than that, maybe in the 13-14 range? Anyway, going back and forth between our dorm and home, she always managed to cram in all of her stuff. She came back to school after winter break once toting her huge suitcase and two massive boxes, one of which contained a new TV. It took some creative packing but the car did get the job done. We did NOT always go home for the weekends... she lived about 100 miles away, so she brought up a lot of stuff.

Bottom line: the car lasted for a very long time under (sometimes) sparse care. A powerful, reliable, fun car to drive that kept on going to the bitter end. If you can find a '91 in decent condition, I highly recommend it. I myself am going to try and get a Maxima before I go back to school - hopefully I'll be writing a review on another year of it soon.

(Update: And I got a '99 SE! One day we'll hear all my thoughts on that one.)