It's all mine, er, ours now

I haven't posted about this before because I didn't want to risk having the whole thing blow up in my face ... but the 1976 Sportwagon from Portland is now sitting in my driveway.

Bryan Thompson won the eBay auction, and I emailed congratulations to him within minutes, offering to buy the car if he didn't want it at some point. As it turned out, he only wanted it to take a vacation trip down the coast from Portland to San Diego and was planning to sell it when he got home. So we agreed that I would buy the car from him, with Bryan cutting his trip just a bit short to drop the Sportwagon off here in Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, Bryan had some work commitments come up, and I stepped in and arranged to have the car shipped directly to me. At about noon today, Rick Watkins (a uShip.com transporter) pulled up and rolled Laverne's car off the trailer.

I noticed a couple of things not readily apparent in the eBay photos; a little door ding on the passenger side and the rather nastily chewed up panel under the front bumper. Other than that, though, this is an incredibly clean car. Like in the hatchback, the radio is hopelessly broken, but everything else seems to be as advertised. It runs beautifully and looks very cool as a little red wagon.

Pictures will be coming later, and I've got some hard decisions to make about other cars, but this is a great day!

Bryan Thompson for the win!

Well, that beautfiully maintained one-owner 1976 Sportwagon that sold on eBay several weeks ago for $3,250 got turned around quickly by its new owner, another used car place in Portland. After offering it up in late July and not having the reserve met (highest bid of $4,250), the seller relisted it with a lower reserve price:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Datsun-Vintage-Nissan-F-10-Wagon-Rare-Datsun-F10-1-owner-GAS-CRISIS-TIME-WARP-survivor_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQcategoryZ6188QQihZ006QQitemZ160268019404QQrdZ1QQsspagenameZWDVW

It had been sitting at around $3,050 for several days until the final minute on Sunday when the snipers went to work. First, someone knocked in a bid for $5,000.01, then Nissan Design's Bryan Thompson bid $5,100.01 with just 30 seconds left, winning the auction at the wire. It figures it would be him ... how many sane people want Datsun F10s, anyway?

He told me via email that he's planning to take a leisurely drive down the coast from Portland with his new beauty. Congratulations, you lucky dog.

32 years ago this month

In July of 1976, as the Bicentennial was being celebrated around the country, I was a kid in junior high in Ewa Beach, Hawaii. I don't think I was reading car magazines at that point, and I definitely don't remember reading in Car and Driver or Road & Track about the new front-wheel drive Datsun, the F10. In fact, the first time I realized there was an F10 was when I saw the late "Queen Henry Charles" in the used car lot at Joe Gibson Ford in Greenville, Texas, in 1980.

Sitting in the Texas sun evidently caused a major outgassing of volatile organic compounds from the interior plastics, so I have an indelible memory of opening the door and sitting down in that red 1977 hatchback for the first time. The smell of the warm plastic is as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday. Compared to the comparatively more primitive (and considerably oldleer and more worn) 1972 Toyota Corolla S5 I'd had previously, the F10 seemed nearly new and from a different era.

It's illuminating to read these contemporary reviews that point out that the F10 has "280Z handling for a B-210 price", or note that it's braking performance was on par with the all-new Porsche 924 tested in the same issues. Everybody was slow back then, and the F10 was, relatively speaking, not a terrible performer for the day.

And of course I had to laugh at the complaints about the shifter; Queen Henry Charles was definitely a "bag of gears" that you had to shift by precise lever placement and prayers to the appropriate deities. Tanya tried driving it once and gave up after a couple of miles in disgust. I thought I just had an extra-sloppy linkage, but evidently they all were like that to at least some extent. (Arnelle doesn't seem as bad as I remember Henry being, though.)

Datsun F10: Overstyled but not overexciting

Datsun Makes a Minicar

How slow?

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F10 vs. F-10

Since the time the car arrived in the U.S., it seems like some people refer to the F10 as the "F-10". How did it get the hyphen when the badges on the car, the owner's manual and the service manual all have the name without a hyphen?

Well, the original sales brochure and print campaign for the car have it with the hyphen. That's undoubtedly the root of the confusion. Check it out:




Was it confusion caused by the brochure and ads being produced in the U.S. and the rest in Japan? Did Nissan change the name at the last minute, after the brochure had been printed and ads already placed in magazines? (Doubtful, given the lead times necessary to design and make trim parts for the cars.) Since this kind of thing is catnip for me, I'm going to keep looking for a definitive answer.

One possible explanation for how F-10 came about: The car the rest of the world got was the related but slightly smaller Cherry 120A F-II and 100A F-II. The F-II meant second generation, as the F10 followed the E10. It's not too big a stretch to imagine someone conflating F-II, F10 and, maybe, fighter plane nomenclature as well to come up with the hyphenated F-10.