With the exception of a handful of cars with four-cylinder engines in recent years, every North American example of the Nissan Maxima has used a V6/front-wheel-drive setup since the 1985 model year. The Datsun 810 and its pre-1985 Maxima successors ran straight-six engines with rear-wheel-drive, amounting to sedan versions of the Z-Car; when Nissan moved to Maxima front-wheel-drive for ’85, the cars kept a bit of Z-Car DNA by getting power from the same 3.0-liter V6 as the Nissan 300ZX. Here’s a television commercial for that first front-drive/V6 Maxima, touting its track performance rather than the luxury that gradually took over in Maxima-Land.
In the 1985-1988 Maxima’s homeland, you could get a four-cylinder engine… but Nissan was hyping the V6 in the Maxima’s JDM ads.
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