Junkyard Find: 1986 Nissan Maxima, Brake Fluid Overdose Edition
You see some weird stuff in San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yards, from lunatic-with-a-glue-gun art cars to dipped-in-battery-acid rust to chopped, Italianized Swedes. Last weekend, I stopped by a well-stocked Oakland self-serve yard and found this puzzling brake-fluid test vehicle.
I’m thinking that Cartel Products probably didn’t hire some East Bay Maxima driver to use their silicone brake fluid and advertise the fact with scary-looking nail-polish-painted signs all over the car. That leaves the question: who, and why?
Well, nail-polish and mailbox stick-on letters.
The radiator smelled like brake fluid.
But it gets weirder than that. Who puts brake fluid in the windshield washer system? And then installs inline fuel filters in the squirter lines?
This is one of those 1980s Japanese cars that had all the control labeling translated directly into English, regardless of hyphenation. SECU-RITY!
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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- Theflyersfan After looking it over, Honda, I want royalties for this one: The Honda Yawn.
- V8fairy Not scared, but I would be reluctant to put my trust in it. The technology is just not quite there yet
- V8fairy Headlights that switch on/off with the ignition - similar to the requirement that Sweden has- lights must run any time the car is on.Definitely knobs and buttons, touchscreens should only be for navigation and phone mirroring and configuration of non essential items like stereo balance/ fade etc>Bagpipes for following too close.A following distance warning system - I'd be happy to see made mandatory. And bagpipes would be a good choice for this, so hard to put up with!ABS probably should be a mandatory requirementI personally would like to have blind spot monitoring, although should absolutely NOT be mandatory. Is there a blind spot monitoring kit that could be rerofitted to a 1980 Cadillac?
- IBx1 A manual transmission
- Bd2 All these inane posts (often referencing Hyundai, Kia) the past week are by "Anal" who has been using my handle, so just ignore them...
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One wonders what other critical fluids the misguided owner replaced with DOT5... Perhaps the motor oil?
i think the answer lays in the locale. San Francisco . A cold, dank,foggy climate. A large preponderance of sexual alternative folks. Feminine hand writing by a male..yeah it all fits.