While the rest of the Autofiends crew has been busy working hard to bring you such items as the Nissan 370Z and our various keeper cars, I’ve been wandering around the Bahamas, buying Cuban Dominican cigars, propositioning the ladies, getting my hair braided, and attempting to touch live pelicans. Still, I’m a car guy at heart, which meant that when I saw the astounding variety of crap amazing vintage JDM cars swerving around the tourist-trap downtown area, I absolutely had to get out my camera and snap a few shots for the folks back home.
Owning a car in the Bahamas is tough. To begin with, there’s an import duty of between 45% and 75% on personal automobiles. Then, there’s something about “bonded” areas and “unbonded” areas. Different people pay different rates for fuel depending on their legal status. There’s also a nearly complete absence of traffic regulations; the roads are one-way except when somebody decides that they aren’t, there’s a near-complete absence of stop signs or other helpful guidance, and every so often some dapper-looking cop just drags a wooden box out into the middle of the street and starts pointing at people for no particular reason. In other words, it’s not the kind of place you’d want to drive an Aston Martin, regardless of what you saw in the movies. You might think this would lead to the Bahamas becoming an island nation of used Cavaliers, but think again; it’s apparently cheaper to import Japanese home-market cars which no longer meet the strict JDM safety and maintenance requirements than American cars which never had to meet, well, any requirements. As a result, the streets of Nassau are clogged with the kind of Nippon iron that warms the heart of manga-reading wannabe tofu delivery boys everywhere — and I’m here to bring it to you, the valued Autofiends reader, starting with today’s Island JDM car, the (approximately) 1992 Nissan Bluebird ARX.
If any single trend defines the Japanese home market in the late Eighties and early Nineties, it’s faux-hardtop sedans. Our Pacific friends fell in love with the look right around the time General Motors was eliminating hardtops from its model lineup way back in 1974 or thereabouts, and for more than a decade, any Japanese car that was in any way “cool” had no B-pillar whatsoever. As little things like noise, harshness, and decapitation-free rollovers began to engage the imagination of the Japanese consumer, the manufacturers came up with a novel way to keep the hardtop look without the attendant (literal) headache: the faux-hardtop sedan. Frameless doors rolled their windows up in front of a blacked-out B-pillar to create the completely unconvincing impression that you, the Exciting Young Japanese Junior Executive, were trolling the Ginza Strip in a genuine hardtop! All the major players had faux-hardtop sedans in their lineup, and as we’ll see in future installments of Island JDM, a few of them actually reached American shores.
You remember the Nissan Bluebird U13 — it came to North America as the first-gen Nissan Stanza Altima, later renamed just plain Altima. It’s miniature-Infiniti-J30 looks combined with frisky KA24 power to capture the hearts of American buyers… but no self-respecting Tokyo yuppie would be caught dead in one. Why? It’s obvious — it wasn’t a faux-hardtop! Enter the Bluebird ARX. It features all the cues of the Nineties faux-hardtop: a vaguely aristocratic front end, frameless windows, hidden B-pillar, uber-thin C-pillar, and a mildly generous amount of chrome detailing. It almost certainly was not as good a car as an Altima, being probably noisier and less stiff as a result of the wobbly superstructure, but it was big in Japan.
The Bluebird ARX we met in the Bahamas was surprisingly well-preserved, and it hummed by without so much as a hint of valve clatter or wheel bearing noise. Its nearly unmolested flanks led me to suspect that it was driven by Somebody Important, an impression reinforced by the withering glare I received from the driver as I not-so-subtly photographed the ‘Bird. It wasn’t the only Bluebird ARX I saw on the island, but it was by far the best. Still, it’s easy to see why these awkward-looking faux-hardtops mostly stayed out of the Western Hemisphere. Why would anybody pay more for a car which simply didn’t work quite as well? As we’ll see in the next installment, it took a hockey-stick-shaped badge to make the faux-hardtop an all-American success story…
