The Fridolin from Nissan
10/05/2022
While some concept cars shown at motor shows achieve fame and notoriety and are still being discussed decades later, others are soon forgotten. One example of this is the largely forgotten Nissan Chapeau, presented at the Tokyo Motor Show in 1989.
On the occasion of our test drive in the VW Fridolin , we remembered the Nissan with similar proportions, which in principle had also been designed with similar objectives.
At the time, "auto motor und sport" characterized the Nissan prototype as follows:
"The Chapeau is intended to be both an individualist and a transport vehicle in one. The model with sliding doors has a three-speed automatic transmission with the selector lever on the steering wheel ..."
The Automobil Revue wrote in more detail in December 1989:
"The Chapeau, in other words "hat", is completely out of the ordinary. It is intended to be a multi-purpose estate car that can probably be used primarily as an advertising delivery car. There is no denying that its design makes perfect sense. This is demonstrated by the optimal use of the floor space (facing upwards), the possibility of getting in and out of the vehicle upright and accessing the load compartment directly from the driver's seat, the sliding door on the passenger side, the asymmetrically divided rear door, the ingenious fixing grids and lower part rails in all four corners of the load compartment, the interchangeable body side panels, the table surface that can be pulled out of the dashboard and the automatic ventilation system that works with solar cells."
The Nissan Chapeau was definitely an unusually proportioned automobile with innovative ideas. This was also the case with the VW Fridolin (Type 147), which was designed around 25 years earlier. Were the Nissan engineers inspired by it?
