While riding to work today I passed one of those forlorn abandoned automobiles that has been left on the shoulder of the highway wearing nothing but a fluorescent orange DOT tow sticker and an old t-shirt wedged in the window.
Normally I wouldn’t think twice about this, but I noticed that it was a late 70s (or possibly early 80s) model Datsun 280zx. Unfortunately it’s not legal to just show up with a tow truck and claim a car off the side of the road. (Without a legit title, it would be more or less impossible to register even if it could be fixed up.)
But seeing this beautiful (if slightly rusty and worse for wear) old Japanese sportscar made me wonder what happened to the Datsun brand. It turns out that the Datsun name goes all the way back to 1914, when the DAT Corporation began building autos. In the 1930s, the parent company was named Nissan and yet the Datsun name caught on.
Datsuns were always innovative and stylish, but in 1981, Nissan looked at the success of Toyota’s worldwide branding and killed off the Datsun name. From wikipedia:
In Japan, there appears to have been what probably constituted a long held ‘official’ company bias against use of the name “Datsun”. At the time, Kawamata was a veteran of Nissan, in the last year of his presidency, a powerful figure whose experience in the firm exceeded two decades. His rise to its leadership position occurred in 1957 in part because of his handling of the critical Nissan workers’ strike that began May 25, 1953, and ran for 100 days. During his tenure as President, Kawamata stated that he “regretted that his company did not imprint its corporate name on cars, the way Toyota does. ‘Looking back, we wish we had started using Nissan on all of our cars,’ he says. ‘But Datsun was a pet name for the cars when we started exporting.
Poor Datsun. It was a victim of some maniacal executive’s bland, globalized vision.
Well it’s 2011 and I think Nissan should bring back the Datsun badge. Bring back cars like the 510, which was originally a cheaper take on the BMW 2002 but now is actually even more collectible than the Bimmer. Bring back inexpensive, well-designed cars and good handling that aren’t bloated with useless bulk.
Here’s a gallery of great Datsuns. Click each thumbnail to see the bigger version.
