1977 was one of those years Mount Wagon in the United States, a year in which car buyers here could choose from 47 different models of station wagons (the number of wagons for 1964 was also 47). The selections dwindled a bit in 1978, but we’re still in the Golden Age of Japanese station wagons here at the time. Toyota offers Americans three wagon options for the ’78 (Cressida, corona, corolla) and Nissan was right there with Datsun 810, 510 and F-10. This is one of the nearly extinct 510 wagons, found in self-service yard near Sacramento, California.
Nissan played fast and loose with Datsun models for the U.S. market throughout the 1970s and 1980s, so today gem dump unrelated to 510s . icon of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This car is a A10 wagon, known as the Nissan Violet Van or Auster Van in its homeland. The original 510 (based on the internal designation Nissan assigned to the Bluebird 1967-1973) was so successful in the United States that Nissan only reused the name for the A10 Violet version sold here for models from 1978 to 1981. Things are even more confusing with 810 a little while later, when it evolved into Datsun 810 Maximaafterward Nissan’s Datsun Maximaand finally Nissan Maxima.
The generation of Violet after this one has been sold here as Datsun (and then Nissan) stanzas, but don’t get confused Meadow-based wagon stanza with stanzas car! In the end, the Altima replaced the Stanza and the Nissan Violet is no more.
This wagon has proper rear-wheel drive, like the original 510, and it comes with a proper 1,952cc L20 four-cylinder engine. This one has a cylinder head and all accessories that were removed years ago (probably decades), but you can still see some indication that the air conditioner is expensive. ($580, or $2,765 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars) was installed.
The $250 automatic transmission ($1,190 today) is also here. The base price of this car was $5,759, or about $27,460 today.
The factory Datsun AM/FM radio is still there.
It looks like this car broke down years ago and has spent quite a while outside.
The six-digit odometer can show 78,033 miles…or many, many more miles. We will never know.
By the standards of 1970s Japanese cars, the rust on this car wasn’t too bad. Enthusiasts don’t seem to care much about the A10 Violet, though, so it’s unlikely this car has much of a chance of avoiding its scrap yard fate.
No one demands more from Datsun than Datsun!
