Recently, I was lucky enough to run into these excellent quality images Nissan has made available of their classic products. The Nissan Newsroom contains hundreds and hundreds of brochure photos of just plain wonderful Japanese domestic market metal, and they display the plain along the plain weird.
For Weekend Edition purposes, I decided to dedicate the weekend for the ones I thought really stood out from the masses of images. The first to go is this 1985 Nissan Safari Granroad High Roof Turbo.


Sidestepping the obvious high point that the truck is brown, the Safari, or Patrol as it was known elsewhere, looks excellent with those extremely period-correct graphics. The vehicle here is fully loaded, and the engine is a 3.3-litre turbodiesel six with 110 horsepower.

The interior shots with their warm tones are inexplicably welcoming, and especially in full-res you sort of want to run your hands all over the flawless, never-worn surfaces. Or I do, at least.

You can’t really help, but wonder if the photo session cars ever made it to rough use and hard daily life. There’s something uncomfortable about the thought that this very example would be found rotting in a remote corner of the Japanese islands, with the cloth seats worn through – even if it’s a tool, and proper, hard use was what it was built for.