A tired workhorse: Nissan Sunny B310 van – Down on the Street

I was under the impression I posted this Nissan Sunny B310 van a long time ago, but apparently, I didn’t! I photographed it over 12 years ago and it has been sitting idle on my backup drive for an almost equal amount of time.

Spotting the Sunny van

I spotted this Sunny B310 van being parked near my garage, but back in 2011, I didn’t rent that space yet. It must have been one of my long bicycle journeys that took me past this van and I decided to take a photograph of it. The photo isn’t skewed, but the road is actually sloping down to the right. I kept the houses in the background horizontal to create this skewed effect. I really liked the amount of fog- and auxiliary-lights on this car and also the two slats on the grill painted in gold!

Stolen camera gear

I must apologize for the second photo being unsharp. Back in early 2011, my Canon EOS 350D was stolen alongside my manual focus lenses. As the camera was 4 years old, the insurance only paid out 10% of its value. By the end of 2011, I sourced a half-broken EOS 350D, got a new M42 adapter plate and restarted photographing with old manual focus lenses. Unfortunately, I did not yet have a manual focus focus-screen yet, so I had to guess the distances between me and the objects and this was often a hit or miss. In the photo above, this was clearly a miss and my focus was off by about a meter or so.

The specs

Normally I always obfuscate license plates. In this case, I didn’t as I checked the plate for registration. Unfortunately, it no longer exists in the Dutch register. This means either it has been exported or been salvaged.

I still do remember the stats for this van. It was a 1300cc engine van from 1987. You can see it’s a van as the roof is raised with at least 40mm. Also the rear side windows are blinded and a separation wall has been placed between the rear cargo area and the rear seats. This would make this car eligible for an official registration as a van back in the 1980s. According to the current regulations, it would no longer be eligible. Strangely enough, the registration was made as a regular passenger car and not as a van.

You can see the car leans towards the back. This indicates it was loaded with some heavy gear. I didn’t take a photograph of the rear of the car, but I remember it having some decals on it and it seems to belong to a plumber.