If you are considering buying a used Nissan Pulsar, these are the common problems worth knowing about first. Our garage database tracks 2 known faults for this model, 1 of them rated high severity. Every one below is a repair bill a seller has good reason not to mention.
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Check a Nissan Pulsar advert (free) →The Nissan Pulsar has 2 known faults in our database, 1 of them rated high severity. The most serious are engine (undersized piston rings causing excessive oil consumption) and engine (DPF blockages and EGR valve failures due to short journey use). None of them makes the car a bad buy on its own; the risk is a seller who knows and says nothing.
That is a count of the faults we hold, not a reliability score. Popular cars get written about more, and a newer generation has had less time to show its faults.
No year is a write-off on its own. What matters is which serious faults a given year and engine can have, and whether the car in front of you has had them fixed.
Each one is set out in full below, with the symptoms, the typical mileage and a rough repair cost.
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 Pulsar advert and we check it in seconds.
Check an advert now (free) →Recall work is done by the manufacturer, and GOV.UK says you will not usually have to pay for it. These are the 3 DVSA recalls for the Pulsar, newest first. They do not tell you whether this particular car has had the work: for that, put the registration into the free GOV.UK MOT history check, which shows a recall status where the manufacturer shares it, or ask a franchised dealer to check the VIN.
Possible reduced retention force of the Rear Door Child Lock switch.
Put right by: Fit a countermeasure part into the child lock door switch aperture of all potentially affected vehicles.
If an electrical short occurs in the supply to the rear oxygen sensor the senor will fail but the driver will not see an immediate warning. A MIL warning may display after continued driving depending on driving/vehicle characteristics.
Put right by: Reprogram the ECU to display a warning if the rear oxygen sensor fails.
On affected vehicles with Pulsar headlight auto levelling the initialisation process during production was incorrect. In this condition affected vehicles may not correctly adjust the height of the headlamp aim when the rear of the vehicle is heavily laden and therefore may not comply with the specific regulation requirements
Put right by: Reprogram the Intelligent Power Distribution Module (IPDM) and re-initialise the headlamp auto-levelling system.
Recall data published by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency under the Open Government Licence v3.0. A recall listed here may not apply to every car of this model: the build dates and the registration check are what decide it.
No Nissan Pulsar year is a write-off, but the C13 (2014 to 2018) carries the most serious faults: 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 engine faults on this page and whether they have been fixed, with invoices. On the test drive watch for frequent low oil warnings and red or yellow DPF warning light. 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 Pulsar advert →
The DVSA lists 3 safety recalls for the Nissan Pulsar issued between 2016 and 2020. The most recent, from August 2020, is "Possible reduced retention force of the rear door child lock switch". Recall work is done by the manufacturer, and GOV.UK says you will not usually have to pay for it. This list is by model, so it cannot tell you whether one particular car has had the work: the free GOV.UK MOT history check shows a recall status from the registration where the manufacturer shares it, and a franchised dealer can check the VIN.
Owners report 50.0 mpg on average across the Nissan Pulsar engines with data, about 80% 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 226 owner submissions. Nissan Pulsar Real MPG by engine →
Looking at a Nissan Pulsar 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 Pulsar 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 Pulsar 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.