Daihatsu Charmant

Among the 112 Daihatsu entries in the MotorJury library, the Daihatsu Charmant holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1974. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Daihatsu Charmant properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Volkswagen Volkswagen Scirocco, the Lamborghini Lamborghini Countach, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Golf — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Daihatsu Charmant reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.2 L Toyota K engine#3K / 3K/3K-H/3K-HJ/3K-U Overhead valve engine / OHV Inline-four engine / I4 (A10) / 1.3 L Toyota K engine#4K / 4K-U/4K-J OHV I4 (A30) / 1.4 L Toyota T engine#; kerb weight is recorded at 790-915 kg (saloon) / 805-915 kg (estate/van); drive goes through 2-speed Toyota A transmission#A20 / A20 Automatic transmission / automatic / 3-speed Toyota A transmission#A30 / A30 automatic / 4-speed Toyota K transmission#K40 / K40/Toyota T tr; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Daihatsu story

Within Daihatsu's own catalogue the Daihatsu Charmant sits alongside the Daihatsu Applause, the Daihatsu Atrai, the Daihatsu Atrai 7, the Daihatsu Ayla. The record names the Daihatsu Consorte as its predecessor and the Daihatsu Applause / Daihatsu Charade Social as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at Ōyamazaki, Kyoto (Kyoto Plant), Japan.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Daihatsu Charmant was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.