The Honker

How many ever heard of this crazy recall by Nissan years ago where they bought the vehicles back from owners ? As a long time dealership technician I performed a lot of recalls but this one was the craziest by far. Nissan decided to buy back all of its 33,000 1987 to 1990 Nissan vans after four previous recalls failed to fix engine fire problems. Yes they bought them all back except for a few! Owners received between $5,000 and $7,000 cash per vehicle based on condition and mileage. And also added a $500 to $1,000 discount toward buying a new or used Nissan vehicle. As part of the recall we mechanics had to drain out all the fluids and remove the battery. Then the van was towed to a scrap yard and the mechanic had to witness the van being crushed and sign off that it did. It made me sick to see many of these nice vans destroyed and we could not keep or buy any of them. A few customers refused the buy out but not many. I had always felt that the vans were fine but customers did not maintain them properly. They were kid haulers and owners just drove them until they gave up or caught fire. I never had one come in the shop for any kind of maintenance. The 4th recall was very intensive and should have taken care of any fire problems but from what I understand the work was so poorly done by mechanics that they had more problems than ever before. So the 5th recall by Nissan was to buy them all back. I did have a little fun though with them back then. Before We would crush them, us mechanics would often play demolition derby with them in the parking lot. We would do that with all the fluids drained (except for transmission fluid) just to see how long the engine would last. Amazingly that engine would run quite a while without oil and coolant. It was a good engine and a good van, sad it met that fate. Because the buyback wiped out nearly the entire production run, surviving Nissan Vans of this model are exceptionally rare sights at car shows today