Next Stanza
In … the seventies … I guess Wikipedia knows when but time wasn’t like that in the seventies. I mean, maybe you personally were born on a particular day in the seventies if you were Gen X and Nixon resigned on particular day but other things just became a smear. Time for you depended on whether you had an even or an odd license plate. Apollo 13? Nobody remembers what day that landed on the moon and frankly the ones after that were even less exciting. Anyway, the electric Citicar was introduced in the seventies and became the best-selling electric car in the US until the Tesla Model S took that crown.
The Citicar was something of a Johnny-come-lately to the US high-tech scene but Japan’s Nissan has been bringing Big Space Exploration Energy to America since the dawn of the Space Era.
Sputnik? October 4, 1957. Back when we still had dates. Datsun 1000 Sedan? Sold in the North America in 1958. I don’t know what day, not because nobody does but because it would take me a long time to figure out and you don’t really care because you were born in the seventies.
I do know that it was around a hundred and ten years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on Feb 2, 1848, in which we celebrated the humble Groundhog by hogging over half of Mexico’s ground. The net effect was, well, we’re still grappling with the net effect but it meant that the little Datsun was technically sold in California, USA not California, Mexico when it arrived.
This happens in space exploration too. Sergei Krikalev left for space one day as a Soviet Cosmonaut and wound up returning to a grassy Kazakh steppe that had changed hands out from underneath him. Literally.
The little Datsun was a space age car in other ways as well. It was cramped, available in limited quantities, liquid-fueled, and built to alien metric measures. Like many space missions, it also had a number. Datsun nerds, like space nerds, may want to slide in and tell you that the Datsun was really a Bluebird and that Apollo 15 was called Endeavour but also Falcon. The analogy falls apart a bit beyond this, like the separation of two space vehicles with Datsun continuing on to the moon, like lunar module Falcon, to deliver a car that few Americans would want and the Apollo program, like command module Endeavour, crashing back to the Earth.
Anyway, Nissan introduced the Stanza in the seventies and rubbed this in. The last Apollo Skylab mission had splashed down 3 years earlier.
The Stanza, like NASA Magellan, has since been mostly forgotten. I mention it because it was originally a mid-size car. Nissan’s smaller car, the Sentra, now weighs over three thousand pounds. The last Stanza, the 1993 Stanza Altima, weighed a hundred pounds less than that. The first Stanza weighed a thousand pounds less than that. The Stanza’s replacement, the Altima, today weighs maybe 3300 pounds.
These are big numbers. We chalk that up to a lot of things. Some people will tell you that it’s government overreach in the form of mandatory safety equipment. Others will tell you that the American obesity epidemic is so pervasive that it’s even snared our pets and cars.
Whatever it is, it’s not laziness. Like NASA, automakers have worked ruthlessly to reduce weight while accomplishing the mission as the mission has crept. Today’s power-actuated, heated, leather seat is probably as light as it can reasonably be and have those features. My electric car has a battery that weighs a bit over 500 pounds. Many car models have grown by that much since I started buying cars, despite going from a full-size spare tires to none at all.
Electric cars and increased road wear from batteries are not the problem that people claim. Neither are they the solution. 4.3 million cars were sold in the us in 1958 against a population of 175 million people. 13.75 million were sold here last year against a population of 332 million people. That’s the problem. The average weight in 1958 was 3700 pounds. In 2022, it was 4094 pounds.
The lunar rover weighed 460 pounds. Perhaps the next Stanza will be a bike.