Nissan TB42 / TB45 / TB48
inline-6 · naturally aspirated · petrol · 1987–present
Also known as: tb42s, tb42e, tb45e, tb48de, tb42, tb45, tb48, patrol petrol six
Nissan's big petrol straight-six — the 4.2 TB42, 4.5 TB45 and 4.8 TB48 — in the Patrol.
It is an iron-block, unstressed engine designed for a vehicle expected to work far from a dealer, and its reputation follows: simple, tolerant, and thirsty in a way that is design rather than fault.
The TB48DE is the one people modify — twin-cam, 4.8 litres, and widely turbocharged — so a stamped code on a rebuilt Patrol engine may not describe what is inside it.
On a standard engine the recurring items are age: a distributor or coil pack that fails with heat, an idle control valve that carbons up, and inlet gaskets that harden and leak unmetered air.
In many markets the Patrol was sold with the RD28 or ZD30 diesel instead, and those have their own pages here — the badge on the car says nothing about which is fitted.
Cars fitted with this engine
1 generation, across 1 make. From the authored catalogue — an absent car means the catalogue has not reached it, not that the engine was never fitted.
Nissan
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
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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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