Datsun 510

Among the 41 Datsun entries in the MotorJury library, the Datsun 510 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 1967. 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 Datsun 510 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. 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 Pontiac Pontiac Firebird, the Toyota Toyota Corolla, the Peugeot Peugeot 504 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Datsun 510 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.3 L Nissan J engine / J13 Overhead valve engine / OHV Straight-four engine / I4 / 1.3 L Nissan L engine / L13 I4 / 1.4 L Nissan L engine / L14 I4 / 1.5 L Niss; kerb weight is recorded at 940 kg (estate) / 965 kg (coupé); the layout is FR layout. 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 Datsun story

Within Datsun's own catalogue the Datsun 510 sits alongside the Datson Type 10, the Datsun 110, the Datsun 120, the Datsun 1600 SSS. It was succeeded by the Nissan Bluebird (610). Design is credited to Teruo Uchino. Assembly is recorded at Japan: Yokosuka, Kanagawa (Oppama plant) / Australia: Melbourne, Victoria / New Zealand: Thames, New Zealand / Thames / Taiwan / Mexico: Civac / Civac, Cuernavaca.

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 Datsun 510 was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.