The Nissan FigaroSome things in life - I'm talking new ideas, knowledge and so on - you really have to work for. They appear in front of you for one fleeting instant only, real blink-and-you-miss-it stuff, and if you don't reach out and take the opportunity they're lost to you forever. But there's another kind of new idea that's much less capricious. They pop up in your consciousness one day, pique your interest and then, if you don't do something about it right at that moment, just keep cropping up again and again until you do. I often learn new words this way. Take 'ostensible' for instance - that one had to crop up maybe six or seven times in conversation and on television before I finally looked it up and learned it. It's like your brain becomes super-sensitive to this new word, and makes a point of hearing it over and over until you can't help taking notice. Well, despite being neither a word or an idea, the Nissan Figaro is like this for me at the moment. I first saw a grey one driving though Portsmouth a few months ago and assumed, as do most people who see one for the first time, that it was a classic car; some masterpiece of fifties design painstakingly restored by an adoring collector. The owner must live locally, I thought, as what was apparently the same Figaro kept passing me in town. Then I saw anther one on the way to work, about 50 miles away, and in the same immaculate condition. This Figaro was mint green, and being driven by a girl of about my age. She passes me most mornings. But this weird coincidence still wasn't enough to reel me in. No, what finally did it for me and the Nisan Figaro was the remarkable story of Jack Neal. As you may recall 3-year-old Jack amazed his parents, and the nation at large, by purchasing a £9,000 car on internet auction site eBay (the story appeared in Hoot's Motor Insurance News section on September 25th). Not surprisingly, Jack's mum and dad defaulted on the payment. We're told the seller understood - about as much as anyone can understand a net-savvy toddler, anyway. And as for the car? It was a Barbie pink Nissan Figaro. Finally I could put a make and model name to the car that seemed to have been following me about for the past couple of months. And, in the course of 15 minutes' private research that became this article, I found out a number of other fascinating details. For starters, the Figaro is much younger than all its quintessentially fifties styling suggests. The curved bonnet and boot, round headlights, oval grille and masses of chrome piping and fittings - all these features were inspired by classic designs but they were actually manufactured in 1991. That's recent enough for the car to have come with a CD player. But out of respect for the fifties, Nissan made it out of reproduction bakelite, a material that fell out of use when modern plastics were invented. Anachronisms like this - building a machine that plays little plastic discs out of the material that plastic superseded - crop up all over the car. Not for nothing did Nissan unveil it at the 1989 Tokyo Motor Show under the slogan "Back to the Future". And if Doc Brown were looking for a city runabout, he could do plenty worse than a Figaro. Most of the car's innards are ported directly from Nissan's hugely popular 1.0 litre Micra, making it highly reliable and economical - and a sight easier to get cheap car insurance for than a 1981 (that's ten years older) De Lorean DMC-12. Other modern refinements - all retro-styled, naturally - include air conditioning, electric windows and power steering. For many, Nissan's Figaro represents the ultimate combo of retro elegance, modern reliability and rock-bottom running costs - especially in terms of cheap car insurance. Various celebrities, including Jane Goldman, Fran Healy and Vanessa Feltz, (and Jack Neal of course) are all credited with owning them. But if you fancy one, don't hang about too long before putting your bid on eBay. Only 20,000 Figaros were ever made. For more info on the Nissan Figaro, visit the excellent site created by enthusiast Jack Walshe
http://www.iobjects.co.uk/figaro/.
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