When I was a small child, my dad drove a 1983 Datsun Maxima that had this. As cheesy at it seems today, it felt magical and impossibly high-tech at the time, especially to me.
I grew up with Nissan my whole life, even worked for them for a bit when I was in the Auto Industry: it ranged from S30s, Hardbodies, B11/12, several L and D chassis, and then my own foray with mainly S chassis.
And can confirm it's a thing. Hell I still make the bing-bong chime (sounded like it was saying NI SAN) before the engine turned over in any car (over 50 now) I've ever owned because of those memories.
While Nissan may not be in it's glory days anymore, maybe the EV era will allow things to get exciting again.
Easily. Probably before even hitting my early 30s.
The term is known as carcaine for a reason, funny enough I attribute not getting into (much) trouble growing up to cars, and it's what gave me access to meeting more people in tech/engineering/medical fields than just about anything else when I was outside of it. I spent most of my teenage years and young adult life immersed in motorsports at various levels and as I said worked in the auto industry for a while.
I had delusions of being a GT pilot for a while, too; so given the company I kept I got access to a lot of cheap/crashed chassis or front clips with misc parts to make things out of for a while. My first 2 businesses were all car/car part based, fintech was the outlier in that regard.
> What are you doing to those cars? Driving not longer than a year?
Bought, fixed, drove, got bored and sold/traded mainly.
50 is conservative to be honest. I still own my very first car, which also makes that same chime noise I mentioned.
Time wise... hard to say, I just keep them until I no longer want to deal with them and do the aforementioned or give it away if all else fails.
The only Nissan I still really want but haven't owned is a Nissan Patrol, which I almost bought when I was in Europe, but decided against it at the last minute and bought a really cool MK4 GTI to teach my friend how to drive and eventually give to him.
I got a Land Cruiser when I got back to the US instead and I'm happy with my purchase.
Sidenote: its stupidly easy to get a car registered to drive in Germany, even as a auslander, if you play their stupid games; what they get you on is that TUV BS which is honestly just another of making sure people subsidize the auto industry--who are incredibly powerful in that country and write many of the laws.
Thanks for the explanation. You living in Germany makes it even weirder, in Austria only the registration of the car is like 250$ one time payment, I guess in Germany its the same?
If I count correctly in the 10 years I've driven since getting my driver's license I had 4 cars already. So depending on your age 50 still sounds high but not that high anymore.
Curious about your age and net worth tbh, so it makes more sense
