Nissan Cedric review: a JDM sedan you likely cannot register in Bahrain
2.1/5motorssouq Editorial Team
Confirm road registration with Bahrain's Traffic Directorate before you send money to a Japanese exporter — for most buyers a right-hand-drive Cedric ends up as a static JDM collector piece or a parts donor, not a car you drive to work. If registration genuinely is not an option for you, the mechanical case underneath (VQ V6, real durability pedigree) is wasted on a car that cannot legally do the one thing a sedan is for.
Pros
- VQ-series V6 engines are smooth and genuinely long-lived
- Body and chassis engineered for taxi-fleet durability far beyond normal sedan use
- Rare enough to be a real JDM curiosity for collectors
- Mechanically simple and cheap to maintain once parts are sourced
Cons
- Right-hand drive makes private road registration in Bahrain a genuine, often unresolved obstacle
- No factory warranty or authorised support network anywhere in the region
- Parts and specialist mechanics exist only through JDM importers
- Realistically a collector or exhibition car, not a usable daily sedan here
Nissan built the Cedric as a rear-wheel-drive executive and taxi-fleet sedan for Japan alone, and the Y34 generation that ran from 1999 to 2004 was its last — direct-injection V6 engines across the range, a genuinely well-sorted chassis, and the kind of over-built durability that turned the model into a taxi-industry staple across East Asia.
The Bahrain problem
None of that history changes the practical reality here: the Cedric was built exclusively in right-hand drive for a market that drives on the left, and Bahrain — like the rest of the GCC — registers private road vehicles in left-hand drive. A handful of grey-market Cedrics do turn up in the Gulf, almost always destined to sit as static JDM collector pieces, donor cars for parts, or exhibition vehicles rather than daily drivers. Anyone genuinely considering one should call Bahrain's Traffic Directorate before paying an exporter, not after.
Setting the registration question aside for a moment, the car itself deserves the reputation it built as a Japanese taxi mainstay. The VQ-series V6 engines are smooth, long-lived and simple by modern standards, and the construction was engineered for the kind of mileage that would retire most European executive sedans of the same era twice over.
What that means for Bahrain is a car whose real audience is narrow: enthusiasts with the paperwork and patience to import, convert or exhibit it, not buyers looking for a usable used executive sedan. For that job, a locally-delivered Toyota Crown or Nissan Maxima of the same era did the same job in the correct-hand-drive configuration this market actually needs.