Nissan Be-1

The Nissan Be-1 is a retro-styled two-door notchback sedan that Nissan built for the 1987 and 1988 model years and sold only in Japan, through its Cherry Stores, by reservation. It was conceived as a fashionable city car and carried no Nissan badging. Nissan's own design team, the industrial designer Naoki Sakai and an unnamed Italian studio each put forward a proposal, and Sakai's B1 design won, giving the car its name. The Be-1 belongs to the small family of Nissan specials known as the Pike cars, with the Pao, the Figaro and the S-Cargo, which came out of the company's Pike Factory project group. It sits on the first generation March (Micra) chassis and uses the 1.0 litre carbureted MA10S inline-four with a choice of three-speed automatic or five-speed manual gearbox. About 10,000 were built, and because demand was so high buyers were chosen by lottery.