If you are considering buying a used Nissan Navara, there are several major reliability issues worth knowing about first. Our garage database tracks 2 known faults for this model, 2 of them rated high severity. Every one below is a repair bill a seller has good reason not to mention.
Found a Nissan Navara for sale?
Paste the advert and we read it against its known faults, its MOT history and the DVLA record, and tell you what the seller has not. Free, about a minute, no card.
Check a Nissan Navara advert (free) →One owner each, in their own words rewritten as a line, and not counted in our risk scoring. A fault joins the list above once a second report or an editorial source backs it.
Sellers rarely admit these faults outright
We track 5 specific phrases sellers use in adverts to soft-pedal these exact issues. Paste any Nissan Navara advert and we check it in seconds.
Check an advert now (free) →An overdue cambelt is the most expensive thing a seller can fail to mention on a used Navara. These are the figures UK specialists work to.
Single-row (simplex) lower timing chain snaps prematurely, destroying the engine. Wear tracks oil history rather than mileage, and the warning is a cold-start metallic rattle. Replace as a full kit; many owners upgrade to a duplex (double-row) lower chain kit for reliability.
Always confirm against the vehicle handbook. Intervals vary by engine, and several manufacturers revised theirs after failures in service.
The Nissan Navara has 2 known faults in our database, 2 of them rated high severity. The most serious are bodywork (severe chassis rail corrosion leading to cracking or the chassis completely snapping) and engine (single-row (simplex) lower timing chain snaps prematurely, destroying the engine). None of them makes the car a bad buy on its own; the risk is a seller who knows and says nothing.
No Nissan Navara year is a write-off, but the D40 (2005 to 2015) carries the most serious faults: bodywork and engine. Year matters less than whether the specific car has had the known fixes, so check the history for them.
Ask the seller about the bodywork and engine faults on this page and whether they have been fixed, with invoices. On the test drive watch for large gaps between cab and load bed and metallic rattle from front of engine on startup. Read the MOT history for repeat advisories, then paste the advert into the free check, which reads it against its known faults before you travel. Check a Nissan Navara advert →
Owners report 27.7 mpg on average across the Nissan Navara engines with data, about 83% of the official combined figure. The gap between official and real-world economy varies a lot by engine, so the Real MPG page lists every engine and generation separately, from 67 owner submissions. Nissan Navara Real MPG by engine →
Looking at a Nissan Navara right now? Check the advert before you go and see it.
If you used to check the Honest John “Good & Bad” section before the site closed in 2026, this page is where that information now lives. We rebuilt the Nissan Navara owner-report history from the archived Honest John dataset, added our own research, specialist and owner-club sources and DVSA recall data, and we keep it free. Each fault above is badged with its source. The same data feeds our free advert check, which reads a listing against every known fault for the exact engine and year.
CarAdCheck is not affiliated with Honest John or Volkswagen Financial Services. What happened to Honest John, and where each feature lives now.
Knowing what a Nissan Navara goes wrong with is half of it. The rest is reading the advert and checking the car's history before you hand any money over.