The last two Meguiar’s promo vehicles were American Fords. This one… well, it isn’t. It’s a pimped JDM cruiser with a flawless finish and style for days – but just what the hell is it?
If you take a map of any British town and draw a straight line across it from one side to the other, you’ll meet certain constants. Regardless of the angle, or indeed the town, your line will almost certainly pass through a backstreet tyre fitter with a smattering of grubby TSW five-spokes nailed to the wall, and a closed-down motor factors with whitewashed windows that’s long since succumbed to the viral spread of out-of-town Halfords megastores. It will pass through a dozen basic-spec Ford Focuses with three wheel trims and fuel stains around the filler, a greyscale kaleidoscope of panel vans, and a couple of shiny new Audi A5s in ice white, trying to pretend that they don’t have a telltale TDI badge on their pert, angular rumps.
What it won’t pass through, however, is a Hakosuka. In fact, you could spend all day drawing intersecting lines across a map of the British Isles and find yourself with nothing in the way of Hakos; you’ll simply have a slightly numb feeling that your time could have been better spent achieving other things, plus the faint pang of guilt that comes with having pointlessly ruined a perfectly good map. The Hakosuka, you see, is not something often found upon this sceptred isle.
Some of you may well be scratching your heads at this point, wondering what exactly a Hakosuka is. The detectives among you will probably have deduced that it has something to do with the rather aggressive machine gazing back at you from these shiny pages, and that’s certainly a logical conclusion to draw. ‘Hakosuka’, in fact, is a nickname for the C10 generation of Nissan’s fabled Skyline, built from 1968-72; it translates as ‘box skyline’ (lower case, as ‘suka’ is a contraction of ‘sukairain’, meaning the actual geographic skyline rather than Nissan’s brand name).
Model nerds will tell you that the Gran Turismo-darling GT-R variant is codenamed KPGC-10, and they’ll also tell you that the thing you’re looking at here isn’t actually a Hakosuka at all. Not by a long shot. You’ve been chasing a wild goose up a blind alley. What this actually is, you see, is a Hakotora. Or, more specifically (and slightly confusingly), it’s really a Datsun Sunny pickup.
Yep, you’re right to be confused. The machine you’re seeing is a custom creation, an entity unique in these isles, and it’s the handiwork of detailing superheroes Meguiar’s and their merry band of skilled affiliates. Regular readers may recall the company’s bagged Ford Crown Victoria cop car, which we featured back in 2016.
“That was our first ever demo car in the UK, and we wanted to build something fun that appealed to a wide audience, but kept true to our American roots,” says brand representative Tom Clarke. The next demonstrator the company built was a gorgeous old Ford Econoline van in pure white, which you’ve probably seen out and about on the show scene. This retro Datsun, though, is very much not an American Ford….
Want to know more? Check out the full feature in Fast Car magazine issue 399 on sale now in all good shops, the Fast Car online shop or alternatively download Fast Car magazine 399 now.
