Like many in my age cohort, I was raised on a steady diet of ‘70s/‘80s American TV shows. I’m talking Dukes of Hazzard, Charlie’s Angels, Hawaii Five-O, The Fall Guy and the like. They showed these (dubbed in French) on the half-dozen TV channels we had back then well into the ‘90s. There were no real domestically-produced equivalents, or too few to fill the airtime. So whenever I see a mid-‘70s American sedan, wah-wah rhythm guitar starts playing in my head.
What, you’re saying this isn’t an American car? Well, it’s sure trying as hard as it can to look like one. I wonder if Japanese TV had to import action/cop shows from the States as well, back in the day. Or maybe they did film “The Six Hundred Trillion Yen Man” and “Mission: Impossiburu” but never exported it, unlike their many animés, which French TV fed us in high doses as well.
This Cedric 230 Hardtop would be a perfect villain car for a ‘70s TV cop show, with those distinctive taillights, that chrome-covered schnozz and that slightly sinister overall demeanour, particularly when clad in classy (and classic) black.
This could never be the cop car, as those would have be the standard pillared saloon, not the 4-door hardtop. No, this sleek Coke-bottley 4-door hardtop has a real TV baddie vibe. I love it.
Four body variants were available for the Nissan 230, the 4-door hardtop having joined the range in the summer of 1972, just over a year after the rest of the range. The lead character in the series would have driven the hardtop coupé with a white vinyl top like this one, I reckon. Something a little sportier than the hoi-polloi sedan, and with enough colour contrast to be identifiable by every viewer. Just ask Aaron Spelling about why he picked that striped red Torino for Starsky & Hutch. Aside from the product placement element, I mean.
Since we’ve met the Gloria-badged pillared saloon version, as well as the Datsun-badged (i.e. export) wagon, there’s no point in going through the model history in too much detail here. Suffice to say that, from a JDM perspective, this 230 generation is chiefly remembered as the one where the Gloria and Cedric became the same car.
Our Cedric here has a 2-litre straight-6 L20 engine under the hood – just the single carb version, producing a modest 115hp and is here mated to a 4-speed manual. This GL trim was the middle of the range for the 2-litre cars, but there were much higher grades available with the 2.6 litre engine. Those cost a lot more in yearly tax though, as was always the way in Japan with vehicles over the 2000cc limit.
Everything chassis-related was as conservative as it could be, but that was one of the Cedric’s big selling points – as was the car’s relatively subdued looks, oversized taillights notwithstanding. Toyota were finding out that going a bit overboard on styling, as they had done with their Kujira Crown, was not a great idea for this market segment.
The detailing in these 230 Cedrics is something else. In America, you had dog-dish hubcaps. This is more the ramen bowl school of wheel design. Deep dish, Tokyo style.
Fine attempt at integrating the model’s logo within the name script, here. It would also make for an excellent title card for the putative ‘70s TV show I was pondering at the start of this post. I can just imagine the adverts. “You got thrills at Ironside, you got chills at Kojak. This season, the must-see drama is… CEDRIC.”
You can find a bunch of those old TV shows on YouTube nowadays, and I have tried going down memory lane a few times. But aside from the music, the cars and (sometimes) the actors, they’re not the compelling television I remember from my youth. Shows like The Sopranos and The Wire have turned most older police dramas into Scooby-Doo episodes, essentially. I find the sole exception is Columbo, doubtless because it’s formulaic and slow on purpose, as opposed to in hindsight.
I suppose the Cedric itself is also quite formulaic and slow (the 2.6 litre ones excepted), so it would make for a perfect ‘70s TV show. I can hear the guitar going waka-waka-waka, as well as fast-paced bongos and a wailing horn section from here.
Oh, but this week’s episode is already wrapping up! Did we shoehorn all the obligatory tropes and clichés in? Driving through alleys full of empty pallets and containers? Scantily-clad blondes? Three minutes of exposition dialog in an office setting? Sober actors pretending to be high or drunk and high or drunk actors trying to play straight? Just need a good old Dutch angle to tick all the boxes… There we go. Roll credits!
Related posts:
Curbside Classic: 1971 Nissan Gloria (230) GL Saloon – Who Do We Think You Are?, by T87
Curbside Classic: 1971 Datsun 240C (Cedric/Gloria) – Japanese American Luxury., by Rich Baron
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Haha, perfect! Wonder if Quinn Martin was a consultant? 😉
Excellent YT sleuting — that’s exactly what I had in mind.
They even used Cedrics in this series, looks like — albeit the later 330…
Hilarious, and also possibly the earliest example of one country’s waste products being exported to another.
I find this a nice clean, well-proportioned design. The side view looks especially good. The detailing is a little over the top, but I’m okay with letting the designers have a bit of fun. It’s too bad Nissan lost the plot later in the decade.
Very clean, considering Japanese standards of the day, these 230 series cars; I also would go so far to say I consider them the only appealing Cedglos from a stylistic standpoint until the much later Y31 series. That said, it’s hard to wrap my head around the 1972 introduction, because my eyes definitely tell my brain “Suddenly, it’s 1968!”.
Nice looking car, but could use taller tires fill those wheelwells up a bit more
That Cedric didn’t handle the Rockford too well!
Indeed it didn’t. Hopping about like someone who’s just stubbed their toe.
2.0 cars never came here they only sent the bigger engine versions.
It really needs whitewalls. Maybe they aren’t available in the right size nowadays? But I see even the car in the brochure shot didn’t have them. That’s odd, because I’m old enough to remember Japanese cars coming with them, and many of the 230s in a Google image search have them.
Lovely car, and in four door hardtop form yet! Mine’s a two-door, from back when this 230 was a new car.
That’s a cool car. Watching that Youtube video, was that the Japanese version of Kojak?
Is it just me, or is there a hint of Thunderbird in the rear end?
I could have fun installing a sequence feature like the ’67 Bird and surprise a few folks behind me in traffic.
I remember being amazed as a kid, when reading my much loved copy of World Cars 1973, and seeing all the different variations of Japanese cars that we didn’t see in Australia.
The 4 door and 2 door Hardtops, coupes, performance versions etc. Cars like this.
The front styling of this car could only come from Japan, I like the basic shape, and love the rectangular headlamps, but a much simpler grille without the extra details would do wonders for the appearance, a bit like one of those Spanish Dodge Darts.
This car harks back to a time when you could tell which country a car was from by the way it looked.
As I get older I am starting to love the 4 door hardtop body style more and more, and this is a handsome car, but those details !!!
Great write-up on a great piece of JDM design – those taillights are quite delicious! I find the pillared 230 sedan a tad boring, but this pillarless version is rather lovely to look at. Not as interesting as the 330 hardtop sedan, but purer in line. Nissan always had such good pillarless styling.
I can’t figure out what the taillights remind me of, but the rest feels very Mopar-ish. This could be a Dart or Valiant if they had gotten a fuselage update in ’70 or ’71. Even the wheelcovers could be from Dodge.
Tonight’s Episode: Glodric’s Elaborate Ramen Shoes.
I know that in aesthetic reality the big Japs all imitated big Yanks, but for the life of me, my mind has never been able to see it. They just look like larger Japanese cars (a perception doubtlessly aided and abetted by the fact that they are that). I think it must be trick arising from the lack of girth, the effect this has on perception of the height, combined with the excitable roccoco detailing all about. When the one in the video above becomes a pogo stick upon performing a Rockford turn, that’s EXACTLY as I’d expect it: it’s just too narrow and tall to slide!
As for the procedurals of yore – and indeed, the entirety US TV until the 2000’s – they were all of them execrable and interchangeable assemblages from the same very brain-drained warehouse, watchable only because of the cars and the exciting abuses thereof. Worse, the diminutive intellects running the business in this country decided imitation was the sincerest form of self-debasement, and without the US budgets, made facsimilies that were even worse. Than the good lord for the arrival of the Sopranos era: it reversed the order of the world.
Most enjoyable post, Tatra-san. Excellent pictures too, and of quite streetside find. I’d wager the car in question is all-original. Something about the paint seems to suggest that.
Once I discovered music and drugs and the counterculture (1967) I couldn’t stand watching tv anymore. In fact the cool thing to do was to have an old B&W tv on in the room but with the sound off while we got high and listened to music. It made the crap on tv look even more absurd, especially the commercials. Sometimes the music and what was on the tv synced in mind-blowing ways. Richard Nixon talking at a press conference with Pink Floyd providing the soundtrack was one I specifically remember.
Sounds a most excellent way of enduring a Tricky Dicky presser. Or 95% of TV for many decades, for that matter.