The Nissan Sunny / Pulsar GTi-R is a homologation special for Group A rallying by Nissan. Nissan had to sell 5000 cars with the same engine as the rally car to fulfil the requirements for homologation. Nissan planned to use the SR20DET as the designated engine and permanent four-wheel-drive as their drivetrain. The combination led to a small pocket rocket that was able to accelerate from 0 to 60 in 6 seconds. The GTi-R was sold overseas under the Sunny branding, while in Japan it was sold under the Pulsar branding.
In the past, I did cover the Sunny / Pulsar GTi-R and I found it quite an impressive little car! I encountered one down on the street in 2015 and I even created two videos about this GTi-R and I’ll add them to the post below. When I recently started doing the How many are left series, I was curious how many GTi-Rs are left on the Dutch roads.
Interesting statistics
I was quite happy to find 27 are left in the license register and only one currently has a valid APK (MOT). What’s even worse is that its APK is expiring within the next two months! This data could be wrong as sometimes there are errors in the register. For instance, I found one imported Sunny GTi-R that had an APK expiry in 1994. This can’t be correct as the GTi-R in question was imported in 2010. As it’s got a license plate, its expiry should be at least somewhere in 2011 But still I believe the single one left to be true.
Nissan demo car
Probably most of the others are currently SORN. A good example is the one with the registration ZF-81-HB, which currently is in the showroom of a Nissan dealership. It’s the original Nissan demo car and the first Sunny GTi-R to be registered in the Netherlands. This dealership obtained it from Nissan and already have owned it for more than 10 years. A Dutch car magazine reviewed it recently in 2021 and probably they gave it a fresh APK for this coverage. If the car wouldn’t be able to pass the test, it probably would be more difficult to insure. The car magazine even created a video of the review:
Anyway, forward two years its APK (MOT) expired once more.
Commercial pocket-rocket van
Another interesting fact from the data is that there are a total of five Nissan Sunny GTi-Rs registered as commercial vans in the Netherlands! I created a video about this topic as I was amazed how you would be able to register a rally homologation monster as a commercial van. If you are curious about how that works, you can watch the video below:
Five years prior, I also created this Down on the Street video:
Yes, my video presenting and editing skills certainly have advanced greatly!
Another GTi-R
I did encounter another Nissan Sunny GTi-R about 13 years ago and this wasn’t a panel van. I found it at a Wangan Warriors meeting somewhere in the south of the Netherlands. I took some photos of it and I posted a photo of this GTi-R on my Flickr account:
You may wonder why I posted a photo with the license plate unmasked. Unfortunately, it no longer exists and it’s not part of the list of cars I found. So either it folded itself around a tree, ran into a ditch, scrapped or exported. But the bottom line: it’s no longer in the Netherlands. But I digress…let’s go back to the statistics!
Pulsar versus Sunny
Another interesting fact I can share is that out of all 27 GTi-Rs, only three of them are Pulsars. All three have been imported relatively recently (2010, 2017 and 2018) and only the most recent car has a valid APK (MOT) for another two months. However, the Voertuig-zoeker website also sometimes keeps records of advisories during the last APK inspections. During previous inspections rust, fluid leakage and play on the driveshaft have been identified. So I keep my fingers crossed that it will pass inspection this time.
Colour palette
The final interesting thing is the choice of colours. Not all cars in the registry have the body colour mentioned, so this data is only based on 21 cars. Nevertheless, it should be representative of all 27 cars. By far, the most popular colour is black. This is the same Super Black colour as found on the March Bolero, Rumba and Polka. The second most popular colour is red. Naturally, we all like our fast cars to be red. The puzzling colour is green as this wasn’t an official colour for the GTi-R. However, this colour features on an imported Pulsar GTi-R and it probably was resprayed in Japan.
Conclusion
I’m really happy with the interesting facts I was able to extract from a relatively small number of cars. These cars don’t vary much as they all have the same engine, chassis and drivetrain. The only differences are the model (Sunny or Pulsar) and the colour.
The fact that 26 out of 27 GTi-Rs have expired MOT means they have to be garaged somewhere. These cars have picked up in price over the past 10 years and they would fetch between 15K and 20K in usable condition and good ones shift for well over 35K! I suspect there is a lot of potential out there in barns and sheds!
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