New Zealand Datsun Club

From 15 sept 1905 - 19 feb 2015
rest in peace
the legend behind the Z cars and 510

This is a nice obituary http://blog.caranddriver.com/yutaka-kat ... ad-at-105/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In fact he was 105 years old, born in 1909. Those 240Z petrol fumes clearly didn't hurt his longevity!

He knew what a good car had to be, just like a horse and its rider, quote:

"How can we transpose the relationship between man and horse into the one between man and car? Even after I was sent to Los Angeles in 1960 to establish Nissan Motors in the U.S., this question never really left me. Eventually I came up with the concept of the Z-car. It was a sports car with a sleek body with a long nose and a short deck, designed so that it could be built utilizing some of the parts and components that were already used in our other production cars, and it was a car that anybody could drive easily and that would give the driver that incredible feeling of jubilation that comes when car and driver are as one".

and this: from here http://nissannews.com/en-US/nissan/usa/ ... -visionary" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"I was very surprised to learn that for Katayama, "something to ride" was in the beginning a horse. "My father loved horses, and every morning before he went to work he would go for a ride on his horse," recalled Katayama. "We were living in Tomakomai in Hokkaido at the time and he galloped along the water's edge at the beach. I sat in front of him and – how can I express that feeling? – it was a pure jubilation that cannot be expressed in words, a vitality that invigorates you from head to toe."

From the time that he started to work for Nissan Motor in 1935, he always kept searching for the ideal relationship between human and car, and it was fascinating to discover that his sense of that ideal was rooted in his original experience of the relationship between man and horse when he still a young boy".

and this:

"After all, horses have to be controlled by humans. The rider needs to bring out the horse's best and compensate for its weaknesses. Cars are the same. They become good cars if drivers handle them well. As a result, a driver can experience a sense of jubilation beyond all reason, sort of like adding one and one to get not two but, say, five or 10, which is the joy of driving a car that a driver can only feel if he and the car become like one. In any event, we're not selling empty bodies called cars. Rather, we sell 'driving performance' or 'a driving experience.' We earn money by offering this driving experience to our customers. That's why I persist in valuing the well spring that is the driving experience".