>Sid Raper:
> Hey, that is the beauty of the list - and the frustration of Nissan. Like
> Dann said in his catalog - you could say that all Roadsters delivered to Idaho
> were purple with yellow interiors and it would be tough to prove it wrong
> (well until that first Idaho original owner shows up...) They changed so much
> of these cars for no apparent reason (like the 1500 bumpers have square holes
> for the license plate light while 1600 units had round holes - why waste the
> time to change the tooling?) that you could be dead on right about YOUR car,
> but the next VIN number could be completely different.
Sid,
I wonder if the admittedly maddening differences in things like the
different holes in the bumpers weren't due to nothing more than at that time
Nissan getting parts from different suppliers maybe even in the middle of
production runs of the same model. Nissan probably didn't make the bumpers
in-house, but bought the 1500 bumper from one supplier, the 1600 from
another. Maybe something like Shelby did with the Cobra. I don't think
Shelby actually fabricated much of anything except maybe the frames
in-house.
Prior to the very late '60s around the time of the introduction of the 510
Nissan wasn't a large company and Datsun/USA was pretty small. There was a
certain shade tree element/hole in the wall garage feel to the dealers.
Thinking about it, the pre-'69 510 shares a history of idiosyncrasies and
differences from its later versions with the roadsters. I'd guess around '69
was when sales really began to take off and greater volume brought more
standardization. About then, too, all of the safety requirements, emission
and tests to meet them began to appear.
None of the Japanese auto makers then probably even dreamed of the size and
complexity of their current operations. In most ways we really do get better
cars today, at least for daily drivers, but from other perspectives the late
'60s/early '70s really were the "Good Old Days", IMO.
FWIW,
Ron
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