Engineer Shin Maki faces the board of the Nissan corporation, trying to convince the assembled executives that, as the 1960s approach, selling cars in America is a good idea.
Maki’s difficult task is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that his front teeth keep falling out. Eventually the chairman asks just what the heck is going on and Maki explains in embarrassment — during testing in California, there was a rather severe accident, and he put his head through the windshield of one of the test vehicles. But the team did win an uphill highway drag race with a Volkswagen Beetle! He is convinced that Datsun in America will do well.
And now 65 years later Nissan sells an all-electric car and a monster that’s capable of going from zero to 100 kilometres per hour in two and a half seconds. Thank goodness they eventually learned how to do seatbelts.
Datsun has been in the news of late as the brand is coming back to overseas markets as a way for Nissan to hawk super-cheap cars without tarnishing the Nissan nameplate.
Of course, in North America the Datsun brand has its own history, and even though it’s a Japanese company, the story of the corporation’s success is a pan-Pacific one.
The very first American Datsuns, the sort that Maki-san was head-butting, were modelled on the Austin A50 Cambridge, and were therefore slightly terrible. They started selling them in California in 1958 and their only real redeeming quality was cheapness.
In Japan, the Datsun badge emerged in the 1930s on an actual car: the Datson Type 10. This tiny machine came by its name in a quite literal fashion, being a small displacement vehicle built by the DAT company (this a three letter acronym of the partners’ surnames), it was the son of DAT. A DAT-son!
Of course, “son” isn’t a Japanese word, and in some dialects actually sounds like the word for “loss.” Not to be overly superstitious or anything, a hurricane destroyed the factory where the first Datsuns were built, and the company immediately changed their name to Datsun, hoping that a reference to rising sun would have better luck.
In the Byzantine mess of company takeovers and acquisitions that accompanied and followed the Second World War, truck-maker Nissan got the rights to the Datsun nameplate and started building cars under it. When they started to bring both the tiny first sedans and pickups to the U.S. market, parent company Nissan elected to just sell them all as Datsuns. Most of the brass wasn’t even convinced America was a viable market.
Indeed, it might not have been given the lacklustre product that was getting shipped across the water. Early U.S. Datsun dealers often sold other brands of cars, or lawnmowers, or were attached to service stations — a real hodgepodge.
Nobody really wanted the Datsun 1000 sedan, and the reviews from the motoring press were fairly terrible.
However, around the same time as the first cars were arriving on U.S. soil, a black sheep named Yutaka Katayama won Datsun its first endurance rally, a circumnavigation of Australia.
For this feat, he was shipped off to America as it was considered highly embarrassing for a Japanese executive to be interested in motor racing.
Mr. K, as he would come to be known, might not have fit into Japanese corporate culture, but he fell in love with car-crazy California. It was a perfect match, and the gregarious, personable vice-president started drumming up business, hand-delivering cars, going door-to-door, doing all he could to get the Datsun brand established.
On the East Coast, Mr. K’s compatriot was a young engineer more in the traditional Japanese mould. However, Soichi Kawazoe had been educated in the U.S., and he had a unique insight into what would make these rinky-dink little cars work in America. He was also not above getting his hands dirty and would occasionally drop by dealerships to do repairs himself.
The first Datsun sedans may not have been big sellers, but their pickup truck was a hit, especially with gardeners and handymen. It was small but it was tough, with a decent payload capacity and very good fuel economy. As many U.S. servicemen on-station in Japan had seen and driven Datsun trucks before, something of a small following began to grow.
Datsun’s big break in the passenger car market would come with the Bluebird series of sedans, with respectable sales numbers finally coming by the mid-’60s. Datsun Canada opened its doors in 1964, and northern buyers on the hunt for a small, fuel-efficient car or truck started looking at Japanese cars in a new way.
The Datsuns weren’t just cheap anymore, they were actually reliable and decently peppy. Then, after a great deal of behind-the-scenes cajoling by Mr. K, the iconic Datsun 510 arrived, powered by a 1,600 cubic centimetre engine that made it a performance rival to the much more expensive BMW 1600.
The 510 proved to be one of Datsun’s greatest success stories and is one of its best-remembered cars, but it’s worth pointing out that most of the Datsuns sold were still the slightly more efficient Datsun 1200s, the “Sunny.” Despite being more pragmatic than the great-handling 510 (which was winning races at the hands of Peter Brock), the 1200 of the ‘70s would have been the Datsun most folks were familiar with. Except, of course, for the one everybody wanted.
This was the 240Z. Emerging from the ashes of a scrapped partnership between Yamaha and Nissan, the gorgeous 240Z arrived in the U.S. in 1970 and was an instant hit. Called the Fairlady in overseas markets, U.S.-spec 240Zs came with a 151 horsepower inline six engine, balanced handling and a great ride.
Sadly, by the mid-’70s both Katayama and Kawazoe would be retired or shuffled off, and the leadership of Nissan U.S.A. would return to a Japan-centric style, with executives visiting America only occasionally. The cars suffered, culminating in the final folding of Datsun entirely: first there were cars badged “Datsun by Nissan,” and by the mid-’80s, all were Nissans. The public seemed confused by the shift, and sales waned.
Now, of course, Nissan is a global powerhouse, having recovered from its slump with excellent products like the Altima. The Versa Note looks like it’s going to sell well, and the GT-R is undoubtedly still a feared machine on the racetrack.
