Fans can’t wait for return of trusty Datsun
DAIRY farmer Aaron Robertson recently bought a car for his daughter. It’s a Datsun 1200. It has no air-conditioning, no electric windows, no computertimed fuel injection and no power steering. No problem: that’s fewer things that will need fixing and there’s nothing much a decent handyman can’t repair on one. They stopped making these in 1976, but it’s Robertson’s third and he’s confident it will be in good running order when his daughter gets her licence. That’s still a way off. She’s only 3 years old.
Faith like Robertson’s in the marque’s ruggedness and long life is widespread. In their time Datsuns won renown as bulletproof and fuel efficient rides. Then, at the height of its power in 1983, the name disappeared. Owner Nissan ditched the 52-year-old Datsun brand and replaced it with its own name. It was a text-book marketing disaster that launched years of confusion, costing the company chunks of market share and many millions.
So it would be reasonable to think that having spent the past 30 years scraping the Datsun name off, Nissan would never want to hear it again. But times change.
Carlos Ghosn is the Peter Jackson of the car industry, a boy from the bush, Brazilian, in his case, with a Midas touch. He runs Nissan. Like Sir Peter, his hints are pored over by the industry’s vast specialist press and filtered by fans for any morsels about projects in the works. So when at the end of a talk about other things he casually mentioned Nissan was reanimating the Datsun brand, the internet lit up like a bonfire.
Details are few, but the plan that’s emerging goes like this. The new Datsun will be built in Indonesia and Russia and sold from 2014. It will be environmentally friendly, small and incredibly cheap. It will be Nissan’s budget offering, sitting below the mid-price Nissan brand and the high-end Infiniti. There will be two models initially, with another added every six months.
It’s aimed at Indonesians, Russians and Indians, specifically those who are getting richer and can afford a car for the first time in their family’s history.
The market is huge: Indonesians alone bought 890,000 cars last year and that’s expected to double by 2017.
Much else about the new Datsun is speculation. Some in Nissan say it will source local bits, maybe Lada in Russia, others say it will be a totally new design.
Aaron Robertson won’t hazard a guess apart from it being a return to Datsun’s cheap and cheerful roots, before it morphed into the Nissan Skyline series of racers in the early 1980s. As Datsun, the company produced some snazzy sports cars, but to an observer not in love with it, the popular Datsun 1200 styles look like a box with the sharper edges bevelled off.
It suits Robertson. His partner’s got a modern Primera; with the windows up and the aircon on, he feels sealed off from the environment. Not the case in the 1200. When it’s warm, you wind down a window and let more air in. ‘‘You can feel and smell and hear the road,’’ the Waikato farmer says.
Jayden Grainger shares Robertson’s affection for the direct basicness of the things. After a day at work as a panelbeater, he’ll come back and work more on the car he’s building in his dad’s garage. ‘‘I hope they keep some of the old styling, because that’s what makes these cars,’’ he says.
The 1200’s little motor fits in a standard engine bay with enough space around it for suitcases. It gleams. Grainger, self-taught, built it out of bits and pieces. You can do that with Datsuns.
In his view the cars are like a canvas. ‘‘I built it to be a reflection of me. It’s what I like in a car and what I think a car should be like. Some people reflect themselves in a painting and some people reflect themselves in their car.’’
BRYAN Jordan says they don’t make them like that any more. A builder for 25 years, now he’s reschooling as a motorsport mechanic at Wintec. He’s got a Datsun ute downstairs, alongside a Nissan Skyline. They mark the very point where Datsun became Nissan.
The ute is badged a Datsun. But he’s had another, identical in every way, with a Nissan badge. The collection marks another automotive history point, too. The 1983 Skyline came just at the tailend of the Datsun era, right about the time cars started to become too hi-tech to work on in the barn.
‘‘Modern-day mechanics plug cars into a machine and if it can’t tell them what’s wrong, they don’t know. You can’t do the backyard thing. It’s all in a little black box. You throw that away and put another one in.’’
Jordan says over-specialisation has reached down to the production line. He owned three Skylines, all made in the same factory the same year – even the same colour. None of the parts from any of them would fit the others, forcing him to shell out for new bits from the maker.
All of this is not to deny there were things that could be improved about the old cars. Datsuns were a bad place to be in a crash. And they rust – to the extent that the low humidity of the South Island means the Mainland is now also Datsun central.
But Jordan’s hoping the new Datsun’s going to be a throwback in the right way.
‘‘I’m guessing you could fix the new one with basic tools. It will be no frills wheels, there will be no flashy chrome bits to fall off, it will probably have good paint, because otherwise the product will be a waste of time. But it will be a rudimentary mechanical apparatus, a time warp.’’
There are other clues as to what the new car may be like. In a twist of modern cross-ownership, Nissan boss Ghosn is also in charge of Renault. The French carmaker has already been down the path of making a basic car for the masses: the Romanian-built Dacia Logan, launched in 2004. It is a contender for the world’s most boring car, but it has strong suspension and ground clearance. It can run on the dodgiest of petrol and has an air-conditioning unit beefy enough to keep you warm/cool in most extremes. Its fuel injection system is too expensive and technical for peasants to fix once it dies, but in other respects is easily repairable. That’s about the extent of its features.
Extrapolating, the Asian/slavic Datsun will have all the charm of an AK 47 and the same sort of durability. It’s aimed at even poorer people moving up from three-on-a-bike city commuting or a donkey. So it doesn’t need sat-nav. It needs to go, and not stop doing that.
Its potential appeal to Kiwis is obvious. The boys all think the new Datsun will get here in some manner. Whether by the boatload or in ones and twos via determined collectors is the question. Nissan says it’s not intended for ‘‘developed markets’’, but whether that applies to us is uncertain. The Dacia was first thought too crude for sophisticated Western Europe but ended up selling like hot cakes there.
Clive Matthew-wilson, editor of The Dog and Lemon Guide, says whether we see new Datsuns en masse on our streets again all depends.
‘‘Car companies will sell cars wherever there is a market for them. If they are an also-ran in Asia, then they won’t be sold here. If they are wildly successful, they will.’’
Matthew-wilson says the company wants to return to the reputation it had back in the 1970s as a cheap and affordable car for Everyman. But, sadly, he thinks that’s probably a forlorn hope.
‘‘The Chinese will simply bombard the bottom end of the market with cars that are cheaper than anyone else’s. I don’t think anybody can compete.’’
He believes Japanese and Western cars are competitive on the quality end of the scale, but that’s not a place where Datsuns, old or new, have ever lived. Ultimately, he’s just not optimistic there’s space for the Datsun’s successful comeback. ‘‘I suspect the battle is already lost.’’