![]() ![]() No, there’s nothing odd about this, it is Eugene, after all. Somewhat curiously, our featured car is missing its back seat, and has become a plywood-sided cargo area, here put to good use transporting an antique bugle. These bees had a sting, and were very active and succesful on the SCCA racing circuits. This is how they often ended up looking like. They were tough, reliable, frugal, and very amenable to hopping up. But the Nissan A series was substantially different, and had an alloy head with much better porting. The Nissan A Series engine dates back to 1967, and although new and with an alloy head, it pays tribute tothe BMC A Series engine, which Nissan had licensed. These engines were already classics at the time. And it has a stick the sedan is saddled with an automatic not exactly a happy combination with either the 1.3 or 1.4 L A-Series pushrod four. Here’s the seats in the coupe quite different. Instead of the seat bottom flaring our at the front, it tapers in. The color of the vinyl is right, but that’s not an original seat the shape is all wrong. So many interesting old cars are dying off, just like the bees. In the meantime, let’s get back to our current Bee, which may well be one of the last on the streets here, if not the last. But that’s what a lot of young folks back then were quite content with. Close, but the Mazda was a much more substantial and comfortable ride, in relative terms. My son Ed really wanted one of these back in the day he ended up with a gen1 RWD Mazda 626. It is the proverbial honey pot at the end of the rainbow. Like so many cars I’ve shot, it’s just itching to be released from its digital tomb. I shot this one a few years back, and have never gotten around to writing it up. ![]() And they were still pretty common here a few years back, including a number of coupes. Which made it a very common sights on our streets. The B210 arrived at a fortuitous moment in history in the fall of 1973, right as the first energy crisis kicked off. This seems to be turning into a Honey Bee CC, even if we don’t have the real thing on our hands. Which would you have gotten? And yes, that’s a non-Honey Bee B210 wheel cover, despite it having a honeycomb design. ![]() Presumably Honey Bee owners had a choice depending on which one suited their personality. Floor trim: Black only (Black or Brown in California)īut for 1976, the stripe was made bigger.Īnd check this out: there were two variations of the actual Honey bee this is the “racer bee”.Īnd this is the “flying bee”, or maybe “stoned bee” might be more accurate.Interior Trim: Black or Beige only (Deluxe has Black, Blue or Brown).Front seat is folding only, instead of reclining + forward-folding.Trunk finisher: hardboard instead of laminated.Blackwall tires now fitted (instead of whitewalls).No Wiper blade high-speed fin (uses basic type from 620 truck).No Rear window defogger switch (blind plug fitted).No Cigarette lighter (blind plug fitted).Here’s a complete list of everything that was stripped out, from : But the Honey Bee was a genuine American-style stripper, lacking all sorts of little amenities that the regular B210 had. It was a blatant repudiation of what the Japanese had pioneered and used to launch their conquest of the American market well-equipped small cars. Or stimulate sales after gas prices stabilized again. It arrived in 1975, one year after the the unsweetened regular B210, and presumably it was a way to keep its price low during a time of considerable inflation. Datsun’s take on the Chevette Scooter, except as the ad points out, it comes with a standard back seat. The Datsun Honey Bee was a way of giving the cheapest stripper version in the line a bit of…buzz. Obviously the folks at Datsun USA headquarters ate a lot of the stuff, and were duly inspired. And most of all, it was cheap probably the cheapest sugar delivery system per ounce. In my candy-eating days of yore, this was one of my favorites. But given its honey color, we have to give this one an appropriate name: Bit OK, so Honey Bees are suffering from the same issue as real bees still, you’d think there was one left. Now that certainly shouldn’t be grounds for disappointment, as B’s all seem to have disappeared along with real honey bees, which are of dying off at staggering rates. But as I wended my way between rows of silver CUVs and got closer to it, I realized it was just a plain old B210. That mellow-honey colored peanut of a car just screamed “B210 Honey Bee” to me, something that has eluded me thus far in my hunting. From some distance across the parking lot, I thought maybe I was really going to score. ![]()
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