Who doesn’t love a commercial vehicle? Who doesn’t love a retro-futuristic Japanese Domestic Market commercial vehicle? Who doesn’t love a gastropod based pun…? No? Well suit yourselves, but from my perspective those three factors are highly desirable and the holy trinity has only ever been achieved once. For fans of snail-inspired retro-futuristic load-luggers, I bring you the Nissan S-Cargo.
Being strictly JDM, the S-Cargo was never a common sight beyond the shores of its homeland and that’s a shame. To be honest I’d almost forgotten about them until last week when after years of not encountering a single example I saw two in a matter of days. One was spotted in the wild, negotiating a roundabout in a distinctly un-snail-like manner, and then I fell over a second example unexpectedly fronting up a local used car pitch. I confirm the validity of this double sighting as they had different markings so I wasn’t seeing the same one twice. Now that I know one is for sale locally, I want to buy it. I am obviously susceptible to perceived rarity creating a sense of desirability but even if we were over-run with the things, I still think an S-Cargo would be a cool chariot. Here’s why:
Back in the mid-1980s the retro-futurist design movement had yet to be an automotive trend. The BMW MINI, Jaguar S-Type and Volkswagen New Beetle were still more than a decade away and most manufacturers were desperate to ensure their latest products were visibly distanced from those of old. Nobody was looking wistfully back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s and imagining such cars were the shape of the future.
In the 1980s “New” was good and Japan was at the forefront of consumer product technology and synonymous with innovation. For a country that seemed set to dominate the industrial world, Japanese culture is largely incompatible with the overtly aggressive corporate culture found in the West, and particularly America. Broadly speaking, Japan had been an isolationist country for a very long time and it was only following the US occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 that the Japanese started to emerge as a leading world power. The presence of the Americans certainly influenced their popular culture but rather than being dominated by the US, the Japanese rebuilt their country according to their own rules. It’s an old cliché that they simply took the best of western technology and copied it, but that’s a disservice and greatly underplays the reality.
Taking the motor industry as an example, they may have used Western products as a jumping off point but through principles of continuous improvement they soon leapfrogged ahead and virtually extinguished those firms that served as initial inspiration; the British Motorcycle industry could attest to that. If you consider that only 20 years elapsed between Hiroshima being comprehensively flattened by a nuclear bomb and Mazda launching the space-age Cosmo from a factory in the very same city, it’s staggering what was achieved in those post war years. If retro-futurist car design was going to emerge from anywhere, it was going to come from Japan.
Nissan revealed a retro-futuristic concept car named Be-1 at the 1985 Tokyo Motor Show. It had been styled by a designer named Naoki Sakai, a Japanese citizen who had perhaps not coincidentally spent time at a formative age making art in San Francisco. Sakai tapped into a public demand for friendly little cars that harked back to the good old days and played heavily on the “cute” factor. Bombarded with interest, Nissan moved rapidly to put the Be-1 into production for 1987 and developed a range of similarly appealing small vehicles, subcontracting assembly out to the Aichi Machine Industry plant and calling the venture “Pike Factory” after their special projects group. Based on the Nissan March (Micra), the Be-1 was too big to qualify as a Kei-Car but was an instant hit with urban dwellers nonetheless, to the extent that a lottery was set up to allocate the limited production run of 10,000 cars. The Be-1 was followed by the similarly March-based Pao and Figaro, produced in runs of 51,000 and 20,000 respectively.
Clockwise from top left: The Nissan March (Micra) which was
the base vehicle for the following BE-1, Pao and Figaro.
Outside Japan, you are most likely to see a Figaro than the other two, which is a shame as the Figaro is the most self-consciously postmodern of the lot and lacks the utilitarian purity of its stablemates. But enough about the cars, they’re worth another article for another day. We’re talking vans today, and the Pike Factory had that covered too. The cars look almost normal compared to the Nissan S-Cargo, which slid onto the market in January 1989.
Inspired by the Citroen 2CV Fourgonnette, the S-Cargo was named in honour of the old tin snail, “Escargot” being an admittedly clever pun for a commercial vehicle. The S-Cargo was also based on the Nissan March but benefitted from having a larger engine than its relatives, having a 73PS 1.5 litre carburettor OHC petrol engine from the contemporary Nissan Sunny. The three-speed automatic transmission was perhaps not the enthusiasts’ first preference but made good sense for a van operating in an urban environment. However, nobody bought an S-Cargo on the strength of the oily bits. It was all about the styling. There are more practical small vans for sure, but few that turn heads like the S-Cargo. In some respects the strange creature looks rather home-made, but so did its French inspiration.
The big slab sides contrast with the curvy arc of the roof, windscreen and bonnet, forming an almost continuous flow from tail to nose. In profile the body (-shell, if you like) unmistakably recalls the shell of the gastropod. Note the large fabric sunroof, not something usually found on a commercial or a mollusc for that matter, but evidence that Nissan weren’t following the normal rules of vans. Down at the nose, the S-Cargo’s headlamps stick up like a snail’s antennas or if you prefer a motoring reference, a Frogeye Sprite. Either way it’s all very animal kingdom. You could say the big black door mirrors represent the ears but snails don’t have ears. Perhaps there is a hint of Panda Bear, or maybe they’re just mirrors and not every styling decision on the S-Cargo project was animal related?
Curiously for a van, Nissan optionally offered strange circular portholes in the side panels that only make sense when you learn they exist to offer daylight to the foldable rear bench seat. Inside, the Citroen 2CV influences continued with a dashboard mounted gear selector, single spoke steering wheel, austere steel framed seats and a big central speedometer which predated the BMW MINI by twelve years. Due to the sometimes steamy Japanese climate, one concession to modernity was air conditioning, essential to bring down the temperatures under the greenhouse-like glass area. If this could be seen as a sensible feature the inclusion of a removable sushi-tray pointed the needle back towards odd again. However, amid all this styling frippery the S-Cargo was still a reasonably useful delivery van with a load bay height of 1,230mm and a maximum payload of 300kg once the rear seat was folded away. Granted, that wouldn’t equate to many bags of gravel but it would take a lot of sushi.
You could dismiss the S-Cargo as a twee styling exercise but that would be to misjudge it. It was intended to look a certain way for sure, but at heart it’s a genuinely simple and lightweight vehicle, just like all the best classics cars are. These days, legislation and customer expectation has created a breed of highly complex cars which sometimes masquerade as nostalgically designed fashion items, but that’s all they are. In contrast, the most complicated element of the S-Cargo is the three speed automatic transmission but that’s hardly rocket science and was pretty old fashioned even in 1989. That’s why I like the S-Cargo; it’s surprisingly unpretentious for something deliberately created to be cool and trendy, and just about avoids being self-conscious. What could have been an embarrassing novelty that dated faster than yesterday’s milk, now looks better than ever.
