This Chinese EV Looks Like It Could Be A Tribute To The Strange Datsun F-10, So I’m Finishing The Job

Sometimes plagiarism is a calculated act, but other instances are unintentional. Did Ray Parker Jr. really rip off Huey Lewis when writing the Ghostbusters theme? Robin Thicke’s overplayed pop hit Blurred Lines sure sounded a lot like Marvin Gaye’s Got To Give It Up –was it a reverse-engineered composition or did the writer just subconsciously remember it playing from an AM radio as a kid in his mom’s Honda years before? Did John Fogerty really copy himself from a track he did with his band Creedence Clearwater Revival years before? Is that even possible? (Yes, he was actually taken to court over that.)

The same thing might be at play with Chinese car maker Changan. They recently showed off a rather odd crossover/SUV that has an odd resemblance to a very odd Japanese car from the 1970s: the Datsun F-10. We could steal this Changan design and use it as the basis for a tribute to the funny-looking Nissan that arrived when that now-struggling brand was at the top of the sales charts. Shall we?

More Funky Cats, Please

China’s auto industry seems to be pumping out a new model or even make of car you’ve never heard of essentially every 90 minutes now. Initially, many China’s designs were either blatant how’d-they-get-away-with-that copies of cars from more established Asian or European brands, like this BMW X5, um, homage:

And for your further consideration, here’s a Geely Leopard that clearly thinks it’s a shark, as in tiburón, as in Hyundai Tiburon Coupe:

Meanwhile, truly original concoctions may defy description, Consider the Ora Funky Cat, and yes that is its real name:

Honestly, it’s sort of like going back fifty years to when the early Japanese cars coming to America were either bad pastiches of Western cars or ill-conceived start-from-scratch designs. I love the insanity of these Chinese upstart things, though over time the designs appear to be getting more and more assimilated into more “normal” looking cars. Thankfully, there are manufacturers still willing to take a chance with odd concepts, like Changan with their Qiyuan E07.

This fastback SUV or crossover has a glass “hatch” cargo area which can slide up to turn a car into a sort of pickup truck in seconds.

There’s even a fold-down tailgate that can work with the rear “hatch” open or closed:

The idea is hardly new; Studebaker’s Wagonaire was the first to incorporate it, and GMC used it again decades later on the GMC Envoy XL.

Both American incarnations of this system flopped, probably because there’s rarely a need to carry objects that tall. There’s little reason to believe that the Qiyuan E07 will do any better, especially since as a fastback it can’t hold anything close to the cargo that the Studebaker or GMC could when the roof is shut. Still, I’ll never complain about companies having the courage to try something again.

More than the roof design, though, is the uncanny resemblance that the Changan has to one of the last cars on earth you’d think anyone would want to revisit, but I think you’ll agree that this could easily be made into a tribute to this controversial looking product of a once-high-flying brand. Why should we do this? Stop asking so many questions!

They Were Driven

People often laugh at the rather bonkers model lineups that European car makers had in the seventies, but honestly Nissan (then sold as Datsun here in the US) was no better. The brand claimed to have something for everyone …
… but that “something” in many instances rather ill-c0ncieved. Datsun’s 1978 lineup was a mish-mash of sublime, ridiculous, and flat-out laughable if not outright bizarre designs.

Let’s dissect this very odd lineup before delving into the one that Changan inexplicably seems to be making a modern replica of.

280Z and 280Z 2+2

At the top of the Datsun range was a machine so different from the rest of the lineup that it may as well have come from a different manufacturer (or planet) entirely. This was the now-fuel-injected version of the vaunted S30 Z series, a car automotive journalists continue to wet themselves over and proclaim as the Greatest Car In The History Of Western Civilization. There was a two-seat and barely-four-seat model, the latter of which some critics even said was a better design than the rather distorted 2+2 E-Type that it obviously was emulating.

We owned a deep green 280Z 2+2 identical to the one in this brochure for twelve years and 160,000 miles before it essentially rusted in half. I despise hype, so it pains me deeply to say that it was every bit as good as these fawning critics stated. If anything, it was better. Whether minus 20 degrees outside or 120 above, the thing would start with the first turn of the key. I have no clue as to why the actors in Wild West getups above own Zs, but if you ever get a chance to buy one yourself, do so. You won’t regret it.

810

Talk about a disappointment. If you heard that Datsun was making a sport/luxury sedan with an overhead cam straight six from an earlier Z and fully independent suspension, on paper you might think they had a Japanese rival for a BMW 733i. Then, you took one look at the car with its whitewalls and Detroit styling and it’s immediately apparent that the guys in Munich were not going to lose any sleep over this thing.

At least there was a Volvo 200-sized station wagon body style that BMW didn’t offer in America until years later.

It reportedly drove better than its shrunken Plymouth Fury appearance would imply, but you were getting a reliable family sedan, not a Black Forest road machine contender like later “4DSC” Maximas.

200SX

It’s well known that we’re not big fans of most AI design here at The Autopian. I guess if you spend days typing in enough prompts into Midjourney you’ll get a reasonable result – by which time I’ll already have drawn exactly what I wanted to show. However, if you just put “seventies Japanese sport coupe” into the program you’d probably get a misshapen result that would look much like the actual 1978 200SX.

What the hell was this thing? The styling was described charitably as a Citroen SM as seen through glasses covered in Vaseline by a person with limited vision to begin with. I will say that at least the wraparound taillights and huge side marker lights are enough to make Torch hyperventilate with excitement.

Sales were as limited as you might imagine. It didn’t help that 1978 also saw the debut of Toyota’s American-designed second-generation Celica, a Dave Stollery-penned masterpiece. It didn’t help that the Celica also featured far more advanced mechanicals than the poor Datsun rival.

510

To many enthusiasts, the name “Datsun 510” immediately calls to mind the 1968-73 models that were raced with much success in the early seventies. With clean styling and rare-for-the-price four-wheel-independent suspension, the first 510 truly did offer a BMW 2002-like experience for far less money.

For 1978, Datsun relaunched what they called the “new 510” to much fanfare and, based on what Datsun Voice Guy says in the ads below, with the great Jewish Elvis singing Shiloh:

As with many new cars of the Malaise era, this one was appreciably worse than its predecessor.

No independent rear suspension, an uninspired motor, and styling that truly looked like what you’d see if you opened a late seventies era picture dictionary to the word “car”.

Reliable as death and taxes of course, but otherwise this great-grandfather of Big Altima Energy was rather lacking.

B210

Oh, come on, everyone loves the Atomic Cockroach! Datsun’s subcompact came in a variety of flavors, including the stripped-down Honey Bee coupe that the EPA rated at an insane hybrid-like 50MPG highway.

For me, though, the one to have would be the hatchback coupe that looked like an image of an Italian exotic put onto a Shrinky Dink or Silly Putty and stretched into comical proportions. Look at those overstyled honeycomb wheel covers! Datsun’s failure at visually making a mini-muscle car created an adorable little mutt.

With a live axle on leaf springs in back, the B210 was hardly the last word in refinement. But the build quality and reliability (combined with low price) means that in any photo of “CHiPs” era LA or Son of Sam/Saturday Night Fever-vintage New York, you’ll see at least one B210.

F-10

Last and almost certainly least, the F-10 was Datsun’s first real foray into sub-compact front-wheel-drive cars designed to fight the European onslaught from such machines as the VW Rabbit and Renault 5/LeCar. Datsun wanted to compete with them in the worst way, and the F-10 was arguably the worst way.

The archaic American offerings of the time like the Chevette and Pinto may have lacked the F-10’s FWD setup, but the Datsun’s road manners were no match for the German and French competitors (not to mention Japan’s benchmark Civic). Fuel economy was good, as expected, but then so were all the small Japanese coupes of the period (the B210 might have been better, actually). Power was low even for the era, steering feel wasn’t great, and sound deadening was nearly nonexistent.  Car and Driver quipped “the body has a remarkable ability to magnify road noises and surface drumming.” Overall, C and D concluded the “the F-10 sedan seems the answer not to the low-dollar enthusiast’s dream, but to a question nobody asked … a minicar that doesn’t add up.”

What’s worse is that the only thing the F-10 seemed to offer over other poor-performing and noisy economy cars was the “sporty” styling, and that was questionable at best. The F-10 coupe has appeared on more than one “ugliest car” lists I’ve seen, and I reluctantly admit that it sort of belongs there. The wheels look like thimbles and the body section is way too thick, particularly in the back under that nearly horizontal glass hatch. The odd hexagon taillights are mimicked in the front with giant hexagonal bezels that dwarf the ill-fitting sealed beams they surround in a rather ghastly face. I’m not even sure if you could say that it’s “cute”.

The F-10 was available as a “wagon” body style as well that might have been less offensive looking than the infamous coupe, but horrendous woodgrain stickers on the side of some did it no favors.

I’ve never even seen that purple two-door “sedan” bodystyle ever on American streets; it was obviously in the brochure but did they ever actually sell it here?

I’m sure there are some Autopians who owned one of these and remember it fondly, but the real question is why anyone would make a tribute to such a car? Yeah, I know that Changan probably didn’t have that in mind when designing it, but I certainly do. Let’s fire up Photoshop and take this the extra mile.

F-Bomb

My claim of how much the Changan Qiyuan E07 looks like a Datsun F-10 is proved out by how little I have to do to make it look like Nissan’s first real front-drive American market car. Here’s the unaltered E07 and a 1978 F-10:

And now, I give you the NEW Nissan F-10:

I’ve made it into a two-door, though you could certainly have a quattroporte version as well. The front “grille” is now taller and features projector headlights in recesses that simulate the, uh, “distinctive” face of the F-10. It still resembles Admiral Ackbar after a bender, an important styling que. Wraparound side marker lights connect with the turn signals that pay tribute to the awful Pep Boys-style orange boxes of the original Japanese coupe. Damn, they really phoned it in back then. Bigger wheels and tires help.

In back, the E07’s resemblance to the F-10 is even more pronounced. Once again, here’s the unaltered Changan and the F-10:

And now, the Datsunized version. I’ve changed the taillights to look more like the hexagonal units on the F-10, again blended in with the side marker lights:

I’ve spec’d a combination hatchback and fold-down tailgate since I think that could be useful, but the sliding roof has been omitted. If it didn’t sell in 1962 and buyers passed again forty years later, it will never sell. I have, however, bucked the no-rear-window trend in a big way by having the large glass hatchback AND a small window between the taillights as seen on old Italian exotics like the Lamborghini Espada, and Japan’s own Honda CRX.

Somehow making this thing a tribute to a curious-looking Japanese car from nearly fifty years ago results in what appears to be a Nissan Rogue design that really is a rogue design, by the literal definition of the word. Honestly, it seems to work better than either the F-10 or the Changan. Who’d have thunk it? If the Chinese firm tried to sue Nissan for copying their design, they could countersue for their theft of the F-10, right?

Why Tho?

Now you’re going to spoil the fun by asking the obvious question: exactly why would we do such an exercise in the first place? The answer: why the hell not? It’s not like Nissan’s current Rogue is a Museum of Modern Art-worthy creation, and Nissan/Datsun was hardly verging on the point of collapse when they sold the F-10 back in the day- far from it.

Indeed, with the motley crew of cars listed above that Nissan had in the years just before Motley Crue existed, they were able to snag the title of second best-selling import brand in America behind just barely behind Toyota for years on end (and far ahead of longtime former champion Volkswagen, which lost the crown forever after 1974). Maybe this new twist on the old ugly-duckling F-10 could bring some of the good luck Datsun/Nissan had then to dispel the power of the Greg Brady evil tiki that was somehow slipped around Nissan’s neck. They should at least try.

All images by the manufacturer unless otherwise noted

Let’s Raid The BMW Parts Bin To Make A Real Toyota Supra GT – The Autopian

How Toyota Should Bring Back The Mighty Tercel – The Autopian

What A New Saab Might Look Like If This Dutch Solar-Car Startup Brought The Brand Back From The Dead – The Autopian

Subaru Needs To Bring The Weird Back With A New BRAT – The Autopian