If you’re like me, a dose of 90s Japanese automotive nostalgia is about as good as Prozac. Friend of TTAC Michael Banovsky unearthed this gem – a still intact website from 1995 highlighting Nissan’s home market offerings at the Tokyo Motor Show.
Coming on the tail end of Japan’s golden age of automobiles, the development cycles planned at the height of Japan’s economic bubble were coming to an end. For Nissan, this was a few years before the Carlos Ghson-era, and the rationalization of product and platforms had not yet begun. Vehicles like the Cima, Cedric and Gloria were sold side-by-side despite marginal differences in styling and content, while the aging 180SX was sold alongside the much more modern S14 Silvia.
My pick of the lineup is the Rasheen (above), a Pulsar-based CUV that coupled the slab-sided styling of a Hummer with the packaging of a Dacia Sandero-like front-drive CUV that was meant to be rugged and spartan, rather than a RAV4-like cute-ute.
The descriptions for each model remind me of those nutrition labels on my box of French Toast Crunch.
Alas, that website is no Space Jam.
Nor is it as awesome as the You’ve got mail site. Still some pretty nice looking boxy Nissans on there though. And I love the lack of obnoxious Flash (unlike You’ve Got mail).
Flash hadn’t been invented yet, so yeah.
“If you’re luck me”
Not sure I’m “luck” you, but *like* you I find the design of the Nissan Rasheen to be honest and purposeful to the concept of the compact CUV/SUV and not unlike the BOF XTerra that although long in the tooth still attractive in it’s utilitarian form
To me it looks very close to a Honda Pilot. Or maybe I should say the Honda Pilot looks very much like this car.
Look at the XIX concept they never made!
http://www.nissan.co.jp/ms95/catalog/common/reference/95d/95d.html
I thought the same thing. If someone said this was a JDM 1995 model Honda Pilot, I wouldn’t bat an eye.
“It’s 1995”, not “Its 1995”.
Editor! Editor! Over here!
One of my pet peeves. Can’t believe I missed that. :)
I love the Gloria with the Bentley-style front, and BirdView Navigation (very impressive for 1995).
My Cefiro (I30) was a good car as well, though I like that navy better than my pearl white.
Also, I always thought the Cima and President were the same car, just trim differences – but the 3M won difference in price says otherwise. 8,890,000 is nearly $75000 in today’s money.
The Cima slotted in between the Cedric/Gloria and the President. The 2nd-gen Cima did become the 2nd-gen Q45 in the US (where the occasional wag dubbed it the “Q41”).
I can’t tell a size difference between gen1 and gen2, so they must have been pretty close.
Here’s a page for an EV concept from back then, which looks like it ended up being the Micra.
http://www.nissan.co.jp/ms95/future/concept/fev-2/fev-2.html
And a sporty four-seat convertible.
http://www.nissan.co.jp/ms95/future/concept/aa-x/aa-x.html
And the Nissan version of the Impreza Outback.
http://www.nissan.co.jp/ms95/catalog/common/reference/srv/srv.html
This page has images you can print and make little paper 3-D cars.
http://www.nissan.co.jp/ms95/report/olreport/olreport16.html
That EV was apparently used as the basic design for the current Micra. Mind blown!
BTW, if you play a bit with the URL, there’s more to find: http://www.nissan.co.jp/ms95/gallery/gallery.html and so on. Check the “menu” and replace the parts of the URL.
Oh, and here’s more on the FEV-II: http://www.nissan-global.com/EN/ZEROEMISSION/HISTORY/FEV-II/
If you like these print and cutout paper cars, here are links to a ton of them:
http://genius.x0.com/pmdirectory/index.html
Made one of a Mk II Ford Capri just this past weekend.
Looking through the prices is fun. You could almost get two GT-Rs for the cost of a President (aka Q45).
Looking around that link there is an interesting parallel between the Rasheen, Juke, and web design.
Vintage sites, as simple and cheap as they look, load swiftly and are easy to figure out. As simple as the tastfully practical and boxy Rasheen.
The Nissan Juke is modern web design, clunky, useless, and it needlessly complicated.
We need more Rasheens, we need more sites with TTACs purposefully simple layout.
Love the Wartbug type headlights. The Rasheen is 4wd as well. and could be had with a small space saver spare wheel cover on the back just like a ‘big’ 4wd. They were all over Hokkaido, Japan when I was there in the mid 2000’s. I have seen one in Australia and asked the owner to buy it (his Japanese wifes car) he couldn’t work out why anyone would want it – but then they went to the trouble of importing it.
Well I like it but anyone who knows me knows I would prefer to drive a box. This is, indeed, a box.