Curbside Classic: 1963 Nissan Cedric (31) Custom – Small Step To The Big Leagues

The ancient Chinese saying “A journey of ten thousand li starts with a single step” was never truer than with the big Nissans. Today, they’re usually called Infiniti and have gone global, but at the very start, they were called Cedric and looked like an Eastern European reinterpretation of a Checker. But it’s not about the car, it’s about the step.

To be entirely frank, this particular car is not the very first step – it’s the facelifted version of it. And it was a pretty extensive facelift, to say the least. Not to mention the extra wheelbase on this Custom trimmed car. But let’s proceed in order and rewind a few years, for the story of the first big Nissan is worth a little trip to the mid-’50s.

The year is 1955 and Nissan just started assembling the Austin A50 Cambridge under license. It was a unit body car with a reasonably modern 1.5 litre OHV engine, the famous B-Series. And unlike most domestically-produced “big” cars (i.e. between 500 and 1500cc) of the time, it had IFS and a four-speed gearbox. Production became 100% domestic by 1956 and carried on until early 1960.

Nissan took this time to work on the Cedric, which had virtually none of the Cambridge in it when it replaced it at the top of the range in April 1960. The looks were quite different, of course. A distinctly American tinge was applied quite liberally, minus the dimensions – more Vauxhall than Austin. The Nash-esque stacked quads were an odd choice, making the Cedric 30 look narrower than it otherwise would have. It was a unit body car though – a Japanese market first for this type of higher end model. This was the Cambridge’s main legacy, as Nissan engineers did learn a lot from the English car’s monocoque construction.

It is well known that Nissan adopted and refined the Austin B-Series engine (dubbing it the Nissan C-Series), but those were initially smaller (1 litre) and used in the Bluebird. The first Cedric 30s received the new Nissan 1500cc 4-cyl., a.k.a the G engine, good for 70hp. Regulatory changes meant that larger blocks were allowed and Nissan had a 1883cc 4-cyl. (83hp) ready for service. It was fitted to the Cedric Custom, which had an extra 10cm between the wheels and appeared in late 1960. Wagon and van variants, for their parts, were launched at the 1961 Tokyo Motor Show.

In late 1962, the Cedric got a facelift so drastic that it even changed its model number to 31. The nose was noticeably longer and the quads were placed horizontally – a pretty big improvement. The taillights got a little bigger too. But the real novelty was the Special, which featured an extra 20cm of legroom and a 2.6 litre six – a JDM first, both in terms of capacity and number of cylinders.

Very few people could afford Specials though, so Nissan used the same ultra-LWB body, but fitted with the 1.9 litre 4-cyl., for the Custom – a.k.a our feature car. Standard (er… I mean “Standrad”?) Cedrics with the 1.5 also remained available, including some delivered for taxi service with a 2.1 litre Diesel. The Cedric 31 carried on until October 1965, getting minor trim changes on a yearly basis.

But as the mid-‘60s approached, the Nissan started to look pretty dated, especially compared to its increasingly numerous domestic competitors. Isuzu missed the mark with their Bellel (top left), but eternal rival Toyota’s second generation Crown (top right), from 1962 onward, proved a formidable opponent – as did the Prince Gloria (bottom right), from ’62 also. In 1964, the superbly designed Mitsubishi Debonair (bottom left) further compounded the issue.

Against this renewed, stylish (for some) and growing opposition, the Cedric had to make do with a late ‘50s-style panoramic windshield, a rather upright body and a pointy rear end. Now up to 88hp, the 1.9 litre 4-cyl. (mated to a 3-speed manual or an optional automatic) was decent enough, but certainly no longer in the same league as Toyota and Prince, who fielded 2-litre sixes.

The first to fall victim to this increasingly difficult state of affairs was the 1.5 litre Standard, which was dropped after 1964. However, the LWB variants like our Custom here were still very competitive in the legroom department, dated styling aside: nothing made in Japan at the time could really compare, save for the (far more expensive and not quite as roomy) 1964-67 Toyota Crown Eight.

I see a bit of Checker Marathon in the Cedric 31’s profile. In a parallel universe, Nissan kept a Diesel version of this design going until the early ‘80s, albeit without the poor Checker’s gigantic 5mph bumpers, for taxi service. Just like they did with the Cedric Y31 a few decades later.

It’s interesting that Nissan opted for this twin round dial design for the instrument binnacle, given the propensity for horizontal gauges at the time. The super-deluxe Special got those – as well as a lot of wood veneer that looks a little over the top. The simplicity of this Custom’s dash is far more agreeable. But the real attention-getter was at the back of the cabin.

Standard wheelbase cars made do with 253cm (99.5 inches) and were not exactly spacious, but good enough for a 1960 Japanese product. This Custom’s extra 30.5cm (12 inches) really changed things for the back seat occupants and kept the Cedric in the game. Nissan would revisit the idea of a LWB Cedric with the Y31 in the late ‘80s, but when this model went out of production in 1965, the real replacement was the President – another important step, given it had a V8 and its own platform.

Generation one Cedrics were exported, though it’s unclear exactly where, how many and how well they fared. There was a Yue Long version in Taiwan; some apparently went to Australia, where they failed to make much of an impact (unlike the Bluebird), save for the name, which was widely ridiculed. It’s unlikely that the LWB variants were shipped over in any quantity (if at all) though. It did not matter much, as Nissan were aiming this Cedric at the JDM anyway, and it sold pretty well here: just under 145,000 units were made in five years. It was an encouraging result, given that Toyota had made over 150,000 of the 1^st generation Crown, but over seven years.

The first modern Japanese effort in the executive car class was the aforementioned 1955-62 Toyota Crown RS, followed in 1959 by the first generation Prince Gloria. But both cars were somewhat based on previously existing models (the Super and the Skyline, respectively), whereas Nissan’s approach, informed though it was by their formative Austin experience, was to go for a clean-sheet design and to stretch it beyond the limits that had been set by the famously rigid Japanese bureaucracy.

Not content with ushering all these advances, the Cedric was also the first car marketed by its maker under its own name. There is not a single mention of Datsun anywhere on this thing, unlike the Bluebirds and Fairladys they shared the showroom floor with. That was probably not the case for export models, but it was another key step in Nissan’s long and sometimes confusing history. The slow and messy process of erasing the Datsun marque started here, back in 1960. It only took another 30 years. The Cedric nameplate, for its part, carried on for ten generations, only disappearing completely in 2014 when Nissan got out of the taxi business.

A moment of hushed silence please, ladies and gents, for the first-generation Cedric. A big car for some, but a giant leap for Nissan.

 

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Curbside Classic. 1965 Nissan Cedric Wagon., by Don Andreina