In the early 1960s car design was just hitting it's peak. Cars from that era were designed by artists who were given free reign to create mobile works of art. Sure, there were some less than attractive cars out there in the 1950s and 1960s, but as a whole the quality of the designs from this time possessed a sense of style, grace and charm that had never been seen before, and unfortunately was never to be seen again. In 1965 Ralph Nader (pictured above) published a book called "Unsafe At Any Speed" , in which he suggested that American automakers, in the blind pursuit of corporate profits, were knowingly manufacturing cars that endangered public safety. As a net result of the backlash caused by this book the US government rushed into law the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act which outlined new vehicle standards that were to be implemented by American car makers, and also foreign car makers wanting to sell cars in the USA. These new standards were to be put in place by 1968.

There is no doubt that Nader's book, and the subsequent introduction of the new standards, made new cars safer, and statistics show that they had a significant influence on the number of fatalities and injuries on American roads. But the visual impact of these new standards on post-1968 cars was nothing short of catastrophic. In the space of only a couple of years car design was forced down a black, plastic-filled road from which it could never return. The ornate painted metal and chrome plated dashboards that were central to the charm of these pre-1968 cars, were replaced with dull black non-reflective deformable plastic dashboards. Any chrome within the driver's field of vision was outlawed, meaning that the exterior of the car lost a lot of it's visual impact as well. Restrictions were also placed on the designs of the external trim and the frontal shape of the cars to minimise injury to pedestrians hit by post-1968 cars. The days of the automobile artists having free reign to create the designs they wanted were over, from 1968 onward they had to operate within the tight, and creatively-crippling confines of the new standards. There is no doubt that there are many truly wonderful post-1968 cars out there, but when you look at these cars today you can't help but wonder just how much better they could have been without the Nader-influenced restrictions placed on their designers.

The most obvious visual element that seperates a 'modern car' from an 'old-fashioned car' is the plastic interior, cars built after 1968 all have the 'modern' plastic look. Some would argue that the modern plastic look is more attractive, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion on the subject, but regardless of opinion, 1968 was the year that Datsuns went from being Early Datsuns to Late-Model Datsuns. As we said before, there are a lot of exceptional and very desirable post-1968 Datsuns, but this website is intended as a celebration of the cars from an earlier and simpler, and more elegant time.
 
 
 
 
 

pre-1968	post-1968