Remembering Japanese cars from the past

Tag: skyline dr30 (Page 1 of 5)

JDM Trivia #6: 1981 Nissan Drive Guide System

JDM Trivia #6: 1981 Nissan Drive Guide System

This weeks trivia is all about the 1981 Nissan Drive Guide system which was basically a crude navigation system for the Nissan Skyline DR30 and the Nissan Gazelle and Silvia S12. Nobody took a wild guess at the teaser from last week, but I’ll get to the purpose of the antenna in this episode!
JDM Trivia #6: Nissan Drive Guide System
In the 1970s the most advanced navigational system in your car was…a road atlas and a compass! Of course the US military was solving that problem by shooting up GPS satellites from 1973 onwards but the automotive industry also made attempts. In the 1980s in Germany and the US companies used antennas to send signals via various radio frequencies but this was very costly. Meanwhile in Japan Toyota, Honda and Nissan made their own attempts to solve the car navigation question.

1980s Japanese Navigational systems

In 1981 Honda implemented a system called Electro Gyrocator and this system breathed tech savvy Hondaness as the system used an Helium gas gyroscope to detect both rotation and movement. The complex system required printed plastic maps and if you are interested in more photos and background information, Japanese Nostalgic Car blog wrote an article about it. In the same year Toyota implemented a system on their Celica XX but I was not able to find any information about how that system worked.

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WTF: Easy url on Skyline DR30 FJ20ET

How easy is it to remember a URL that contains DR30 and FJ20ET? The Nissan Skyline DR30 below features a FJ20ET so naturally for any JDM car nut it is easy to remember:
WTF FJ20ET Friends meeting at Tsururingu
It was not really visible when I first spotted this photo of the first FJ20ET Friends meeting at Tsururingu, but there was a whole “short” and “easy” url on the spoiler of the DR30.

It is a pity that WordPress does allow me to do quotes around the easy part as the first part of the url is, at least for a non Japanese person, difficult to remember. See for yourself: Continue reading

Games: Over Drivin’ Nissan Skyline Memorial

Back in the 80s I played was a game called Test Drive that allowed you to drive a Ferrari Testarossa, Lamborghini Countach, Lotus Esprit, Porsche 911 and the Chevrolet Corvette C4 (the order is my pick order from 1987). Shortly afterwards it was was succeeded by Test Drive 2 which only had the Ferrari F40, Lamborghini Diablo and the Porsche 959 and Test Drive 3 followed quickly. Then it became silent for a while as the company who created Test Drive created a fantastic game called Stunts. The only game to be considered a successor in the years after was The Need For Speed by Electronic Arts. It basically had the same feeling as Test Drive 1 including the police persuits and Test Drive 2 and featured again a set of “affordable cars” including the Toyota Supra JZA80, the Acura/Honda NSX and the Mazda RX-7 FD.
Over Drivin' Nissan Skyline Memorial
This game got really high scores from the magazines and became an instant bestseller and successors were made in big quantities. The NFS series also sold in Japan as the Over Drivin’ series. Of course the game quickly adapted to the Japanese taste and in 1996 the Over Drivin’ Nissan GT-R was released which included Nissan-only cars (more on this one in a later post). This series also included a special edition called Over Drivin’ Skyline Memorial which basically is the same as the original The Need For Speed game but this time it contained the full Nissan Skyline range up till 1997:

  • Nissan Skyline GT S50-B
  • Nissan Skyline 2000 GT-R PGC10
  • Nissan Skyline 2000 GT-R KPGC110
  • Nissan Skyline 2000 GT-EX KHGC211
  • Nissan Skyline RS Turbo C KDR30
  • Nissan Skyline GTS-X HR31
  • Nissan Skyline GT-R BNR32
  • Nissan Skyline GT-R BNR32
  • Nissan R390

I remember playing this game a lot around 2001 or 2002 on my emulator (I did not own a NTSC capable Playstation) and had great fun with it!

The nice thing is that earlier this week IKnowSkyline posted all the video footage of all Skylines in the game in one single video:

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Friday Video: Rotary vs Skyline by Best Motoring

Back in the early 70s Mazda and Nissan fought for the grand championships with their rotaries (RX-2 and RX-3) and their Skyline GT-Rs (KPGC10 and PGC10) and Best Motoring is reliving those fierce battles with a bit more modern machines in Hot Version 52 (Rotary vs Skyline):
Friday Video: Rotary vs Skyline
Unfortunately by the time Group 5 races emerged in Japan this meant the cars used never were the actual production cars anymore. So what Best Motoring did was to line up cars that never battled with each other and they range from early 80s till early noughties.

My personal favorite is the battle between the Mazda RX7 SA22C (tuned by REOS) and the Nissan Skyline RS Turbo DR30 (tuned by Escort) and you can watch this battle in the video below: Continue reading

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