Here’s How My 1984 Nissan 300ZX Fared Running 3,567 Miles in Nine Days

I pulled my Z into my Upstate New York workshop on Oct. 16. If you've been following me and The Drive on Instagram, you've seen a few visual highlights of this 3,567-mile road trip since I left LA on Oct. 7. It's not too late to look now either, of course! But I'll run through the context very briefly for those just joining us.

In 2017, I effectively inherited this 1984 Nissan Z from its original owner. With over 200,000 miles on its odometer and after years of aging in the sun, it would run, drive, and stop, but needed a lot of love to be roadworthy.

While observing isolation recommendations at the height of COVID panic, I started thrashing on the car in earnest and got it running gloriously. Not long after that, I had to abandon it myself, returning a year later to partially re-restore it and road trip across the country to my new garage via Japanese Car Day in Brookline, Massachusetts.

You can get more info on the car itself and how I prepped it for this trip, a last-minute repair I had to make using toilet plumbing, and a progress report from a little over halfway en route here:

And now that the trip is complete, I'll run through highlights, lowlights, and big takeaways. Hopefully, we'll also be planting seeds of inspiration for more folks to take long cruises in their old cars. But if you don't want to do that, I hope to help you experience such a trip vicariously through this story!

The most direct trip I could have taken would have been 3,208 miles at 49 hours of driving time, per Google Maps. I didn't end up going much further in distance (at 3,567 total miles) but I did spend something like 80 hours in the driver's seat chasing down fun roads and trying to avoid the country's biggest thoroughfares.

Route 64 in and out of Taos, New Mexico was the hardest on the car; with long climbs and a lot of high-rpm driving. But shuttling across the top of Indiana and Ohio from (Madison, Wisconsin to Hubbard, Ohio) on interstates was the toughest mentally. Just a long transit stage at highway speed; it took me something like 12 hours door-to-door.

The new-for-1984 Nissan 300ZX (also badged a Datsun, as it was the brand's "crossover year" from its old name to the one we know it now) was not critically acclaimed when it came out. But it must have been reasonably respected by the general public because I lost count of how many Gen X-aged men and women came up to me to say something like "that car's awesome," and then proceed to tell me about "that time" they got into some kind of mischievous hijinks involving a car that looked like my Z.

So if you're not looking to have conversations at every gas station, don't take a car like this cross-country. Otherwise, however, it's an exceptional choice.

Thanks to the apparent blessings of the car gods and fairly thorough preparation, I'm thrilled to report I had basically zero automotive issues on this trip. I barely even had to add any oil—about a quart over the entirety of the 3,500-mile mission.

The only thing that actually broke on this trip (as far as I can tell) was the speedometer. One day it just decided to zoom all the way around from zero, past its optimistic max reading of 145 mph, then back to zero where it stuck—indicating any speed above 1 mph to be, like, 200 mph. I'd like to fix it, and will eventually, but frankly, if I had to sacrifice any single gauge I'd give up the speedo as least important.

Full disclosure: Only the total mileage, hotel, and fuel spend I can substantiate as completely accurate, the other figures here are educated approximations and extrapolations.

The Larz Anderson Automotive Museum is a beautiful space in Brookline, Massachusetts which is just west of Boston. Every year the museum hosts a whole calendar full of events, many of which are car shows themed by country of automaker origin (e.g. British Car Day, Italian Car Day, German Car Day, ...). When I realized its Japanese Car Day fell on a date that was also a reasonable return target for this trip, I thought that was a perfect impetus for our crossing.

The event organizers thought so too. I dropped them a line to say I'd be driving to their show from LA and Executive Director Sheldon Steele asked: "Do you want to park it inside the museum during the show?"

"I mean, that'd be amazing, but let me send you some pictures of the thing and I won't be offended if you decide to retract that offer after looking at them," I replied. Luckily for me, Mr. Steele has a sense of humor and an appreciation for cars that are still rough around the edges even though his museum is filled with mint-condition masterpieces. The museum did not retract its offer and let me park the long-suffering Z in their main hall. Plus, I got to give a little spiel about the trip and what I learned to some folks. Thanks again to those of you who made it to the event and said hi!

Now that the original pinstripes have lasted this long, I decided I just can't erase them and will resist repainting the car indefinitely. That streets-of-LA patina is here to stay. I will, however, be looking into getting the rust around the windshield taken care of before it spreads much more.

I already mentioned wanting to upgrade the lighting and add a cooler cargo setup. Other than that, I think I'd like to attempt to fix the sun-cracked dashboard, clean up the engine again, and of course deal with the leaky steering rack.

Now that the Z is safely tucked into a garage, its aging will slow down a bit. I won't run it when there's salt on the roads, but you better believe this car will be on adventures across state lines again this fall and as soon as next spring.

I took a few hundred frames on this trip, and of course, I wouldn't subject anyone to all of them but there were quite a few bangers I couldn't quite fit into the story here. You might see some of these pop up elsewhere around The Drive and our social media channels, but for those of you who scrolled this far, here's an extra batch of images from the road.