Katayama
and Kawazoe had direct personal knowledge of the car's problems, for in the
beginning theirs was truly a shoestring operation; if a Datsun broke down - and
one often did - and everyone else was busy, the sales manager himself might
have to drive the repair truck to pull it off the road. Katayama and Kawazoe,
in fact, sometimes ended up doing the repair themselves. If worse came to worse
and the car could not be fixed, they might even lend the enraged owner their
own cars. Nor was it just the Datsun that was terrible; the first Toyota to
enter the American market, at about the same time, was such a bomb that Toyota
took it off the market, went back to work on it, and did not come back into the
U.S. market until 1964. There were those who worked for Nissan in America who
believed that Tokyo, realizing how bad its car was, had declined to put the
company's name on it, calling it not the Nissan but the Datsun, so that if the
car failed, there would be less loss of face. Only twenty years later, when
their cars were demonstrated successes, did the company go through the clumsy
and expensive process of changing its American name.
?
The
worst thing about the Datsun was that its engine was simply too small. Its
displacement was only 1000cc. Even the VW's was 1300, and the smaller American
cars in those heady pre-oil-crunch days were coming in with engines of 5OOO and
6000cc displacement. With the Datsun's little engine, its acceleration was
poor, a real problem on the entrance ramps of the California freeways. Also,
the brakes were weak. That was not all. The Datsun was designed for Japanese
winters, which by and large were milder than American ones, and the car was
very difficult to start in the winter, in part because the battery was too
small. For the Datsuns in the northern sections on each coast, this morning
sluggishness was a major problem. In the East, the Datsuns were selling mainly
to blue-collar people who could not afford better cars. Generally, were people
who got up early, when the engines were coldest the batteries weakest. Masataka
Usami, one of the Nissan executives, who lived in Greenwood Lake, New Jersey,
and whose own car would not start in cold weather, reported back to his port
team in Tokyo that Nissan could not have a car that started only two out of ten
times. Tokyo was not very helpful. The alleged starting problems were
impossible, they insisted, since they had checked and Hokkaido - the northernmost
of the Japanese home islands, where Datsuns started without difficulty - was
just as cold as New Jersey.
?
?
David
Halberstam "The Reckoning" (1987)
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