Once upon a time, you could actually climb through a car company’s output through the various stages of your life: cheap little cars when you’re young and single and just starting out, moving on up to fumpfering old yawnmobiles for when your pubies go grey. And for a good chunk of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Nissan’s hierarchy was pretty clear: you could start as a sassy single in a Sunny, get married and move on up into a Bluebird with a young family, then into a Skyline when you needed something a little larger for the 2.3 kids in back, and finally into a Cedric or Gloria, if you were loaded or old, or boring or all three. (Anyone could use a truck, and anyone looked good in a Z - both defied mere status up or down the food chain.)
The Skyline was a fairly adult bit of business in those days. The generation of Skyline seen here, internal code C110, was built from 1972 through ’77, and is known in old-school circles as the “Ken & Mary” (or, Kenmeri) Skyline. While the Z-car was a hot performer and was showy about it, the joy of the Skyline was that it was just a simple coupe or a sedan that could do extraordinary things that belied its formal style. It was stealthy, save for the GT-Rs, with their gigantic wheel flares. And really, C110 GT-Rs were few and far between: just 197 were built from September ’72 to March ’73. The vast majority of Skylines had 1.6L or 1.8L Prince-designed fours; only the top-echelon models received the Nissan-designed L-series inline-six.
Within Nissan, there was a push to “Americanize” this generation of Skyline, sending it upmarket and loading it up with luxury features like an automatic transmission; the Kenmeri name is taken from the adventures of Ken and Mary, a couple of kids in love who would enjoy their expeditions to the great outdoors in their Skyline. It’s not by accident that the reverse of Kenmeri is “Meriken” – American. Skyline embraced the personal-luxury-car market just as it was coming on line to replace the emphasis on performance, and the world rewarded Nissan by buying more of this generation than any other generation of Skyline (see sidebar). If this was Nissan’s idea of selling out, could it really be such a bad thing?
And so it makes some sense that, four decades on, Impulse of Japan has built a Skyline, the Nissan model that’s meant to be for grown-ups but still fun, into a super-sano modern-retro machine for grown-ups; it’s an adult treatment of an adult car. A spin around town early on a weekend morning would jingle the nostalgic glands of Drivers Of a Certain Age, and gives younger drivers a taste of How Things Used to Be. We suspect that Mary might be a little annoyed, but Ken would most assuredly swoon.
It would have been too easy for Impulse to go the GT-R route, creating a four-door sedan that even Nissan never bothered to build; some flares, a high-revving Prince two-liter six, some steelies and Watanabes and you’re done. But GT-R clones and wannabes and never-weres have been done. They don’t stand out.
This, kids, stands out.