Past masters?

The first post-war Datsun is a little workaday truck from 1948 – visibly, like the Renault 4CV, BMW Isetta and (original) Fiat 500, a product of a ruined economy with precious few raw materials and whose skilled labour lay blown apart in fetid jungles or lost in the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean.

A more interesting product from an engineering-history point of view is the 1947 Tama – Nissan’s very first EV, built a full 63 years before the Leaf. Strictly speaking, it’s actually a Prince, not a Nissan. Prince is a fascinating and now almost completely forgotten car maker. Starting life as an aircraft manufacturer in WW2, Prince built a series of luxury and sports cars right through to 1966, when it was absorbed by Nissan. We’ll come back to it later, as many of Nissan’s most famous nameplates actually started off on Prince vehicles.

The Tama was powered by a pile of lead-acid batteries and a not very threatening 4.4hp DC motor. In immediate post-war Japan, petrol was still scarce outside of US military bases, but electricity was relatively widely available as Japan started to build a series of hydro-electric dams across the company. The Tama was pretty successful until the early 1950s, when another war – Korean, this time – sent the price of lead sky-rocketing and tilted the economic balance back in favour of petrol once again.

Rolling into the 1950s, there’s a series of fairly dowdy cars that were the fruit of a technical agreement with Austin in the UK, including pretty straight copies of the A40s and A50s that would have been very common sights on British roads at the time. The tale is told that the Nissan executives travelled all the way to Longbridge in the late 1940s, to take possession of the blueprints (no instant CAD data transfers back then) and to sign the licensing paperwork.

The Austin managers felt duty bound to celebrate the deal by inviting their Japanese visitors out for a slap-up meal. Memories in the Midlands, so close to bombed-out Coventry, were too short and too raw, however – Japanese faces and accents were not welcome, and they were turned away from restaurant after restaurant. I hope the embarrassed Austin executives managed to rustle up some fish and chips or at least a few sandwiches for the poor Nissan lads.

In any case the deal was done, the plans made their way back to Yokohama and several Austin-derived cars are sitting here in Zama almost 80 years later to prove that wars pass, and that car companies can survive even the worst of human disasters.

Walking along the neatly and chronologically ordered ranks of cars is really a walk through the history not just of Nissan, but of Japan itself. As we leave the ’40s and their poverty-bootstrap utility vehicles, pass through the staid-and-serious ’50s ration-era vehicles, we start to see cars getting bigger, more colourful and better-equipped as the 1960s dawn.

For instance, it’s hard to walk past the 1963 Prince Skyline. Its Gordon Keeble-esque twin slanted headlights, Michelotti styling and bronze paintwork are already a far cry from the staid black-painted ’50s wagons. And it’s one of the first cars to carry that famous Skyline nameplate – although it has just a 1.9-litre overhead valve four-pot motor under the hood, whose 93hp would not yet set pulses racing at the very mention of that model name.

The Nissan Bluebird 310 from the same year also caught my eye – literally. Finished in bright yellow, this car is a ‘Fancy Deluxe’ no less, but I guess on-the-nose special version naming is okay on a car named unironically after the ‘bluebird that brings happiness’. Designed specifically to appeal to a new generation of female customers, this Bluebird has, and I quote: ‘matching rose damask interior, seats with a wide range of adjustment, a cosmetics holder in the sun visor, a longer accelerator pedal throttle for wearing high heels, a pole across the rear seat for hanging clothes – and a flower vase’. Surely no self-respecting woman could resist such a mildly condescending feature list, clearly cooked up by a room full of blokes smoking cigarettes in front of a flip chart.

The two early-model 240Zs in the collection – Fairladys in their home country – are obviously drop-dead gorgeous. One in dark green, one in a very 1970s mustard, they are still a beautifully restrained piece of design. And of course, under those long hoods we find the first of a whole series of iron-block straight-six engines that would give Nissan’s sports cars such a velvet punch for many years to come.

No surprise that the Zama collection is a Skyline GT-R fanperson’s dream come true. They are all present and correct – from the boxy late-1960s ‘Hakosuka’, the first Skyline to wear the GT-R badge, as well as the oh-so-’70s ‘Kenmeri’ which gets its moniker from a famous series of US TV ads featuring a cutesy couple – Ken and Mary – driving an inexplicably Japanese-registered GT through postcard-pretty US landscapes to an equally inexplicable soundtrack of Japanese folk music. Then there is a big gap, initiated by the 1973 oil crisis, until Godzilla wades out of the ocean in 1989 with the R32, followed by the R33 and the ultimate GT-R, the R34.

This last of the line is represented here by an ‘M-Spec Nür’ special edition in stunning pale gold, which looks almost greenish under the lights. It’s rocking horse poop rare, and Nissan still claims with a straight face that the hand-built N1-race-spec version of the mythic RB26DETT under its hood makes just 276bhp. Well, I’ve seen the real dyno traces of the stock engine and the first figure was a ‘3’, while the other two are not zeroes. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of driving any R34 GT-R knows that the horses that the GT-R engine plant produced were more of the massive Clydesdale variety than your normal dobbin.

These cars are now worth a lot of money. Being old enough to be imported into the States under the 26-year rule, and enjoying a second wave of internet fame, an M-Spec Nür recently sold at auction for over $440k, and even ‘normal’ R34s regularly go for half that. Kind of a pity, really.

Another series of remarkable Nissan cars is grouped together here too – and they are about as far apart on the automotive spectrum from the fearsome GT-Rs as it’s possible to get. I’m delighted to find the full line-up of the so-called ‘Pike Factory’ cars parked side-by-side like a row of Opal Fruits – Be-1, Pao, Figaro, and of course, the wince-inducingly named S-Cargo. They are all pretty much Nissan Marches (i.e. JDM Micras) in drag, but their bodywork is of some technical interest because Nissan was playing around at the time with injected thermoplastic body panels, which explains some of the un-stampable body panel styling. They are all slow as molasses and wobbly as jelly, but who cares when they are this cute?

Tucked appropriately away in a dead-end row of cars I find something that is neither cute nor slow: my favourite old whip, a Pulsar GTi-R, in the same black and with the same diddy little 14in factory alloys that mine wore. I curse myself once more for letting mine go and press onwards.

Turn another corner and we move from the road to the track and piste – Zama contains a mouth-watering selection of Nissan race and rally cars. I’m not enough of a motorsport fan or historian to remotely do them justice, but my butterfly eyes flitted between the bruised-and-battered East African rally 240Zs, the all-conquering Calsonic-blue liveried Skylines that were the weapons of choice for so many PlayStation jockeys, and the purposefully beautiful R390 GT1 that took third place at Le Mans in 1998 – Nissan’s best-ever finish at La Sarthe. Tip of the hat to Ian Callum of this parish, whose fingerprints are all over the R390: the chap can obviously make ‘em fast as well as beautiful. But I lingered most at the hood of the 1999 BTCC drivers’ and manufacturers’ championship-winning Nissan Primera P11 e-GT, driven by Laurent Aïello: what cracking cars these were.

Dragging myself away from the racing cars, I was glad to see in passing that Nissan had on display an example of a car with one of my favourite-ever names – the Leopard J. Ferie. It’s a bit of a 1990s organo-blob these days to be honest, but What-A-Day in the naming committee.

We were getting to the end of the collection. Time was almost up, and fortunately so. Because now we were getting into the cars I worked on – and that’s always a bit depressing, when you’re in a museum. I trotted swiftly past various Micras and Primeras that I had a minor hand in, to pause briefly at a 2007 Qashqai, which the blurb claimed was ‘an example of Nissan’s pioneering spirit’. I nodded sagely, we all did a bit of polite bowing, and I pressed on, a bit embarrassed but also secretly a little proud of what a bunch of us did 20 years ago with this car: four-odd million of them built is not a bad score. And I have apologised to Colin Goodwin for ruining 10 years of his professional life as he had to review every copycat small crossover that cropped up after it. Sorry (again), Colin.

So, my time was up. Which would I steal, if I could? I’m not even going to look at the race cars, although some of the manga-winged racing Skylines did look fantastic. I would not know how to even start them. I’d be horribly tempted by the R34, though. That paint – that engine! James May would use the word ‘fizz’ in an inappropriate way about it, I suspect.

But I have to be honest. I’d hot-wire that ugly black Pulsar. Knowing its lack of anti-theft systems, this would be all too easy. I’d ruin the pristine grey-epoxied floor by spinning its four little Bridgestones all the way to the doors, to bust out into the streets of Zama, headed west for Hakone and the hills. Sorry.

The good news is that the Nissan Heritage Collection is occasionally open to the public. More information here: if you are lucky enough that your travels take you to Japan any time, it’s highly, highly recommended.