Tested: 1981 Datsun 810 Maxima Is a New Kind of American Car

From the April 1981 issue of Car and Driver.

Perspective came in a bathtub. Home for the holidays, I was lounging in steamy waters contemplating Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” when my mother arrived with a tap and a muffled announcement that a fellow on the front porch wanted to take a look at the new Datsun. Now, somebody marching up to the front door wanting to look at a four-door se­dan is a rare thing, but this was happen­ing on Thanksgiving day . . . in south­eastern Kansas. Somebody out there in the rolling, tree-laced great heartland, insulated by twelve hundred miles of landscape on either side, insulated from the import market penetrations up and down the East and West Coasts, was hot to trot for a Japanese sedan!

He was a real-estate agent, fortyish or so, and he came back later when I’d fin­ished my soaking communion with the cosmos. Turned out he was a serious family man, not really a car nut at all, but he’d already put fingerprints and foggy nose smears all over the Maxima’s chilly windows by the time I pulled a jacket on.

He was after something that would look impressive to prospective house buyers, something he could load several of them into for wowing on the way to the properties in question. Something that would turn in reasonable mileage. Something that would be fun. It was plain to see that Datsun and its message are driven all the way to our heartland.

In Iowa alone, foreign-car sales went up 50 percent last year. And now Kansas. When the breadbasket’s real-estate agents and lords of agriculture start to fall, the “Real Americans buy American cars” bumper stickers around Detroit begin to look pretty pathetic.

Judging by the 810, Datsun under­stands Americans better than Detroit does. The Maxima is loaded for Ameri­can bear. Gimmicks, comforts, and com­petences are everywhere, and delivered in a very handsome package. The new 810 has gotten the kind of face lift that snugs up lines without stretching too tight. The old 810 was just as much fun to drive, but it was unrepentantly gawky. The new car gathers a better grade of stares. The Maxima version, a step up from the basic Deluxe, adds a few final exterior trimmings and a jazzed-up interior that rivals some cars costing two or three times as much. The more expensive cars may have an edge when taste and construction are consid­ered, but the Datsun gives little away when features are up for discussion.

The comfortable front seats have, in addition to normal fore-and-aft move­ments, adjustments for recline, height, front tilt, rear tilt, and lumbar support. The 810 wagon even has reclining rear seats. In the Maxima, all these adjust­ments are covered in clinging, synthetic exotifur over what Datsun headlines as “loose pillow-style” cushioning. After you’ve fiddled the myriad adjustments into compatibility with your own inimi­table shape, plunking your buns into position proves a real delight. The seats are equally good for besting the Inter­states and facing down moderately hard cornering. The height adjustment lets you sink away from the headroom-eat­ing sunroof (not a problem in back), and a tilt wheel lets you fine tune your arm reach, though as you dip the wheel lower the instruments begin to disap­pear. These are good instruments, clear, complete, and well arranged.

The 810, in both Deluxe and Maxima, is available as a four-door sedan or a five-door wagon. With the Maxima you get more, so much more. To wit, stan­dard equipment includes air condition­ing, power steering, power brakes, pow­er windows, power sunroof, power cen­tralized locks, power outside mirrors, power antenna, AM/FM electronic stereo with seek/search and digital readout, separate cassette deck, cruise control with resume, variable-wipers, automatic rear defroster, reading light, fade-out interior lighting, map pockets, console, cloth headliner, vanity mirrors, remote trunk release, ignition-key warning chimes, and a little artificial voice that will scare the whee out of you in the middle of the night at the Texaco sta­tion in Chetopa, Kansas, by whispering, “Please turn out the lights.”

You’ll find a standard fold-down rear armrest, too, and ventilation for the rear foot well, nice complements to the roomy aft compartment and properly shaped seat. Alas, the bottom cushion is too low. The trunk is a squat affair given to mussing the hair of all but low-slung luggage and rated at a capacity of only eleven cubic feet.

What you don’t get in the Maxima is a manual transmission. Datsun feels that, while the Deluxe is a suitable repository for either the three-speed automatic or a five-speed stick, the Maxima provides the wrong sort of ambiance for manual gear changing. This is an unduly silly way to think, but the automatic proves not a bad deal behind the frisky 2.4-liter single-overhead-cam six. This is a jun­ior version of the 2.8-liter engine that propels the 280-ZX, and it likes its work, but it cries out for the five-speed. You’ll want to override the automatic quite of­ten. Given its placid druthers, it will up­shift from first at less than 40 mph and step out of second in the mid-60s. Hold­ing it to your wishes will belt you into second just short of the national speed limit, and the swiftish march to third carries up close to 100 mph before you need to move the handy T-bar shifter again. Manual downshifts to second are quick enough, but your speed has to drop to a crawl before you can get first no matter what you do with the lever and throttle.

But the engine is smooth and free, turns in 22 mpg, and managed nearly 18 mpg during our 70-mph-average overland cruising. And it’s a double-fine hustler from 60 mph back up to 90 after easing past slower traffic. Slightly sapped by the automatic, the Maxima still pushes up to 60 mph in a scrappy 10.5 seconds, and on to a top speed of 111 mph.

At anything over 82 mph the cruise control refuses to participate. No mat­ter. The engine has that take-it-for­-granted torque that requires few throt­tle adjustments, and the car feels better as you go faster. The steering is trued as if by a deft gyroscopic guidance system. The wheel works a little in your hands over sudden crests and stutter bumps, the tail does a soft step-out if you brake hard while turning, and the skinny Bridgestones sometimes skate a little, but the coil-spring, independent sus­pension (front and rear) deals firmly with the errant details of the terrain. The reasonably assisted steering clever­ly and automatically increases its re­quired effort as you press ahead faster, and the Maxima just tracks on home. The only changes we’d be tempted to negotiate would be better tires and slightly wider wheels, though the origi­nal alloys are plenty handsome enough. For four-wheel discs, the brakes should be better. They produce vague sponginess, heavy fade under hard use, and merely modest stopping distances for a car with otherwise strong performance. Further work on pad material and some attention to cooling-airflow en­hancement would be a real boon.

Now we come unfortunately to the part that Datsun has really stubbed its toe on: quality control inside the car. Everything works fine and the ergonom­ics exemplify Datsun’s usual cunning handiwork, but not many of the pieces fit together properly. This is a shock, uncharacteristic of past Datsuns, and it’s something that’s not confined to the two Maximas we drove. We’ve checked several others and they displayed the same sloppy fits, ripply dash surfaces, out-of-place door panels, and peculiar color mismatches. But let’s see what happens. This is Datsun. These troubles probably won’t last for long. A few qual­ity-control people back at the factory are probably even now falling on their blades, and when the Maxima has been dosed with Rolaids, Japanese pride, or whatever it will take to get its insides back in order, things will be better.

Spend a little time in the Maxima and it becomes a hard car to resist. It is one of the first to successfully bridge the gap between patent luxury and outright sport. It does a good many things very well, and a few tweaks here and there will add that final touch of irresistibility. And speaking as members in good standing of the get-down-and-grunt motoring club, we’d like to find Maxi­mas for sale with five-speeds. Pipe dreaming right along, think of the big engine in this car. Drifting in my steamy tub that morning of Thanksgiving, I al­ready knew that the Maxima, all in all, deserves a sparkling place in Carl’s cos­mos. With a seconding by the real-es­tate men of America, who could doubt it?

Counterpoints

Used to be that the 810 was a poor man’s BMW that was so ugly only a moth­er could love it. Now that the 810 Maxima looks like a BMW, it acts more like a Japa­nese Cadillac, loose-pillow upholstery and all. It’s quiet and loaded with all man­ner of luxury-and-convenience features.

But it simply lacks the spark that motivat­ed the old ugly duckling. What we have here seems t0 be a clear case of over­ Americanization.

The spirit of the original, I’m happy t0 report, does live on in the base model, however. Base 810s (Minimas?) offer a silky, five-speed manual transmission that restores a good bit of zing and is infinitely more fun to use. The base car’s standard manual steering saves weight, offers more road feel, and is light enough that you’ll never miss the Maxima’s hydraulic assist. And the furnishings are conservative, neat, and almost as European as the clean, taut sheetmetal. In fact, the base 810 seems like a completely different car. It’s nothing less than the true successor to the original 810, and the only one fit for serious drivers. —Rich Ceppos

Datsun has really gotten its act together with the 810. This latest iteration is good enough to be a cut-rate BMW 528i. It has MacPherson-strut front and semi-trailing­ arm rear suspensions and four-wheel discs, and the engine is a fuel-injected, SOHC, in-line six just like the Bimmer’s. The body is smaller, but it holds four in comfort, and has the same hewn-from­-the-solid feel that once was the exclusive province of hi-buck Teutonic machinery.

Of course similar paper specifications do not guarantee equivalent real-world performance, but the 810 comes through. The handling and ride have the BMW’s glued-to-the-road feel at moderate speeds, and at the limit there’s a lot less tail-happy treachery. The engine lacks the BMW’s power, smoothness, and intoxi­cating revving ability, but it still motivates the car crisply, ably assisted by the well­-matched automatic transmission. And you get all this for only $10,000, along with more comfort-and-convenience features than you can cajole out of a BMW dealer for more than twice the price. The 810 represents real value for the money. Just make sure that you can stand the stigma of its low cost before deciding to buy one. —Csaba Csere

To the lady in the instrument panel: Yes, yes, I’ll turn off my lights. I’ll do anything you ask because you are the voice of my dreams. We must meet t0 have many more conversations. But tell me, are you happy in your work? Is that scratch in your voice indicative of slackening quali­ty-control standards in Japan? Do you en­joy living in an instrument panel that looks like a crazy quilt of varying textures and ill-fitting components? And what about that wide, rubber-covered pedal down below—the one next to the acceler­ator? The one that makes the car slow down. Why is the word “BRAKE” mold­ed into it in bold, capital letters? Do you think we’re that dumb here in America? I mean, we accept instructions very well, be they oft-whispered like your or my personal favorite: badly translated Japa­nese service manuals. But you can condescend too far, you know. In any case, we’ll span these cultural gaps once we add a few more words to our collective vocabu­lary. May we meet again in next year’s 810, or shall it be a romantic interlude in the new 280-ZXT? —Don Sherman

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com