1991 Nissan Figaro - Now It's Just Old

I'd seen this car several times before in the parking garage of the gym I go to but always crunched for time, I never took photos of it until the other day. The last time I saw it I saw a woman in her mid thirties driving it out of the garage and I was taken back by someone so young driving such a quirky, old and exotic car. It reminded me of the gypsy hearts I saw as a kid who drove small, European cars as opposed to the enormous American iron of the day. I mean, wow, what other than a devil make care vagabond forgoes modern reliability, comfort and performance for something as frivolous as a prop from an Audrey Hepburn film? Well, imagine my crushing disappointment when I found out this car was not manufactured by Fiat, Citroen or Alfa Romeo but by...Nissan. Yup. This ain't some dainty 1950's European runabout but a 1991 Nissan Figaro. A what?

Not that Nissan builds a bad car by any means but when I found out this was a Nissan every romantic notion I had went out its proverbial convertible canvas top. That's not to say, though, that this little car is not without merit and viewed in the context of 2019 and not 1991, it's not as pretentious as it once was. Especially now that it's as old or almost as old as the cars it once attempted to harken. I'll park my confused sentiments about it and attempt to get at more concrete and emotion free observations about it.

I should have known this was something other than what I thought it was when I saw what appeared to be a modern radio perfectly integrated into the dash board. You see old cars with after market radios blighting otherwise old and artistic dashes all the time but this was different - it looked like it came from the factory because it did! The seats appeared strangely modern too but I thought, holding onto the last shreds of romanticism that I could, that someone might have done an interior swap sometime in the last fifty or sixty years. Everything else about it seemed like it came out of post war Europe. Sorry, I didn't take a picture of the interior because while people don't like their cars photographed in the first place, running the risk of getting caught snapping the interior was not the way I wanted to start the day.

So, what was a Nissan Figaro? Debuting in 1989, under the theme "Back to the Future", the Figaro joined the Austin Mini-like Nissa Pao, the pun-intended S-Cargo van, and the period-styled micro Nissan Be-1 in what was the first wave of retro styled automobiles. Yeah, this was before the "New Beetle", the '94 Ford Mustang and a whole bunch of other throw back cars. Exclusive to the Japanese market, buyers loved them so much that not only did Nissan quickly sell out of every batch they pushed out, they had to resort to a lottery system to help deal with demand and to avoid dealer mark ups. Originally slated for just 8,000 or so units, Nissan eventually increased production to a grand total of just 20,073. And then, oddly enough, that was it. The Nissan Figaro was a one year only "phenomenon". Just as well.

Built on top of a mundane but well engineered, and also exclusive to Japan, first generation Nissan Micra, some "Figs" made their way to the U.K. while a smattering made their way here. Makes sense since the U.K. got some seeing that it's right hand drive country like Japan is but these unicorns that made it all the way to the U.S. are really special. Not to mention one that made its way all the way to a parking garage in friggin' Cleveland, Ohio. I don't want to know the real story - there's no way it's half as good as something I could conjure.

While I love me some resto-mods, I've never been much of a retro styling kind of girl so the throw back appeal of the Figaro is lost on me. I'd much rather buy an old car and modernize rather than buy something new that allegedly looks old. So, with this thing now as old as it is, what are we to make of it? Good question. I guess it's not unlike people we all know who were old when they were young.  Now that they are old, they're just old.