The Datsun brand and its parent company Nissan are struggling. But even before the coronavirus pandemic crisis took its toll on Nissan and the rest of the global motor industry, the Japanese car maker was having a tough time.
Nissan began 2020 at a low point, deeply emerged in the Carlos Ghosn (the Company’s former boss) scandal, and the current global containment has necessarily made things worse for the company.
As a result, Nissan plans to save around £2 billion on fixed costs for marketing, research and other key areas, as well as reducing its model range in the UK and Europe. Nissan will also close a factory in Barcelona, and remove Datsun from Russia, further decreasing the brand’s reach (it remains in India, for example, however).
Before Datsun came into being, an automobile named the DAT car was built in 1914 by the Kaishinsha Motorcar Works (KMW) in Tokyo, the genesis of today’s Nissan. The new 1914 DAT car’s name was an acronym of the surnames of the trio of KMW’s founding partners.
Datsun’s initial vehicle production began in 1931, and from 1958 to 1986, vehicles exported by Nissan were identified as Datsuns. In 1931, the DAT Motorcar Company chose to name its new small car ‘Datson’, the name indicating the new model’s
smaller size when compared to the DAT’s larger vehicle already in production. When Nissan took control of DAT in 1934, the Datson name was changed to ‘Datsun’ because ‘son’ also negatively means ‘loss’ in Japanese, plus the (rising) sun is depicted in Japan’s national flag, hence the more positive name Datsun being chosen.
