Mystery car solved (almost)

"kanadanmajava1" (kanadanmajava1) 11/15/2020 at 17:52 • Filed to: None

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Some time ago there was a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! about a nice picture from the early 50's. It was located in Japan and it had couple of US made cars but also a mystery car. We didn’t manage to solve the identity of the weird one. It’s the weird looking blue car besides the ‘50 Ford. I think I have now solved the msytery . But still not completely .

It’s not a small car as it stand quite a lot higher then the Ford behind it. Japanese cars from those times tended to be quite small so it seemed to be unlikely a locally made car. But despite this it’s a Toyopet (from the company that’s now known as T oyota) .

Here’s a Toyopet SB truck chassis. For some reason it was decided to use this a basis for a car model. Couple of companies were making the bodywork for these.

This a Toyopet Model SG small truck chassis for a refe rence . The car was called as Model SF but these did look very different .

Here are a bunch of Model SB taxis with bodywork made by Arakawa Sheet Metal Works. The front end of these is quite sim ilar with our mystery car but the front fender extend longer and the rear part seems to be roomier.

Here’s another SB with bodywork made by Kanto Electric Motor Works. This one has again slightly different body and it has the earlier style front fenders .

So I think our mystery car is a Model SB that is a some kind of combination of these models. The survival rate of the Japanese cars from this era is next to nothing and even pictures of these are difficult to find. So narrowing down the exact model seem to be impossible. Maybe a visit to some physical photo archive or a trip to Japan would bring the final answer.

This is likely my last post. Thanks all for the interesting years and I’ll hope that we can still stay in touch.

Stef Schrader > kanadanmajava1 11/18/2020 at 21:27

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Tossing this into the void, but that was a lovely last post. Hooray Toyopets! Luckily, there are folks working to archive a lot of these posts at jimisaherb.com, among other places. See you around!