What prompted Datsun to change its name to Nissan?
I believe that what really happened, was that Datsun channged its name BACK to Nssan. When Nissan was first exporting cars to the United States, there were strong concerns that World War II was still rather prominent in the minds of Americans. The car company had a concern, that the name Nissan would remind buyers of Nippon, which as you may know was a major manufacturer in the Japanese war machine. They changed the name to Datsun thinking that it would invoke less negative conotations. On a tangent, this reminds me of a bad joke I heard years ago about how Datsun got its name: The Nissan executives argued long and mightily about what to call the cars they were importing to America. Finally, one executive suggested that they contact the Germans for assistance. His thinking was that the Germans were very good at coming up with names. So…the Japanese executives sat down with a German marketing firm and explained their predicament. The Gemans mulled it over for a while and decided to as
As a retired employee I can shed some light here. Datsun was a car manufacturer which was acquired by Nissan which was if I recall correctly was in the weaving loom business. When Nissan decided to enter the USA market they did think it better to use the Datsun name to avoid injury to the Nissan name in the event of a business failure. I questioned the wisdom of dropping the Datsun name but was told that Nissan wanted to unify its image in America and the world so that the good reputation of Datsun automobiles would transfer to the Nissan name and then to other Nissan products coming to America, medium duty trucks, outboard motors etc. I still think the Datsun by Nissan logo should have been enough.
