Nissan Engine Designations

Nissan, like most car manufacturers, has a designation for every engine it produces. SR20DE is the designation for our engines. The letters and numbers in the engine designations have meaning. They describe engine's configuration. This page explains how to interpret these designations.

The engine designation is broken up into its constituent parts in the boxes below. The fields with white background are present in all Nissan engine designations while those in grey may or may not be present.

A little history: When Nissan began using this naming system, most engines were carbureted,  non-turbocharged and used a single camshaft. As a result a simple designation could be used. As advancements were made and engines enhanced, a way was needed to differentiate between the versions of each engine. The solution: add letters to the end of the base designation that indicate the differences. Thus the letters suffixed to the basic designation depend on the specifics of the engine's configuration. Any combination of these fields may exist, but they will always be in the order indicated below.

For discussion, we will use the engine in R32-R34 Skyline GT-R as an example. This engine's designation is RB26DETT.

We will look at each field individually. The field being discussed is highlighted in red with white text.

Examples: Here are several examples to clarify things a bit.