Also known as: e13, e15, e15e, e15et, e16, e16e, e16i, e-series nissan, e16et, e16s
Nissan's small four of the 1980s — the E13, E15 and E16 — in the Sunny, Sentra, Micra and Pulsar.
It is a simple overhead-cam engine from before engine management meant anything, carburetted on most versions and with early single-point injection on the rest. There is nothing to read with a scan tool on the carburetted cars and very little on the others.
So diagnosis is physical: compression, vacuum, ignition timing with a light, and fuel delivery measured rather than inferred.
Its recurring complaints are the era's — a distributor that fails with heat and gives an intermittent hot-restart stall, vacuum hoses that harden, and a carburettor whose many small passages block on fuel that has sat.
The GA family that replaced it is chain-driven and injected and has its own page here; the two share a model line and nothing else.
The turbocharged E15ET exists and is a different proposition from everything above.
Cars fitted with this engine
3 generations, across 1 make. From the authored catalogue — an absent car means the catalogue has not reached it, not that the engine was never fitted.
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Posted about this engine
Be the first to write this up
Nothing posted about this yet. Whatever you found is worth writing down — even a dead end saves someone the same afternoon.
What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
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