Old is gold: What an old car teaches about quality
Xn Iraki
By
XN Iraki
| Oct 07, 2026
Last week, I stopped to admire an old car on old Lower Kabete Road near Kenya School of Government. I couldn’t resist stopping and talking to its owner, Clement Ndungu, a very jovial man.
When did you buy this car? In 1980, he answered, at Sh36,000. He could remember the original owners and where he worked. The car was his wife’s. He was the second owner. The car was built in 1975. Simply put, the car is 51 years old, more than half a century old, and still on the road!
Can you sell it to me? His answer was no and emphatic. I even have another newer car but prefer this one. Men have a special attachment to their cars that are only rival to their spouses or equivalent.
The old car model is a Datsun 120Y, a legend for reliability when Datsun, now Nissan, competed head-on with Toyota. I recall the Nissan B- series, from B10 –B15 which did very well. Most are still on the Kenyan road.
Why did these cars last that long? One, it is their simplicity: not much electronics and sensors. If you open the bonnet of such an old car, you may think it's empty! Two, it is the interchangeability of car parts. Ndung’u was quick to say that spare parts for his car are still available. Notice the business model: Japanese sell you the car; you keep buying spare parts for 50 years. Can you see where the money is?
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The car manufacturers played the long game; capture a wider market with car quality, espoused by reliability as the selling point. It’s through reliability. That is the Japanese auto industry got the global market. Koreans have followed suit. What of us?
The two manufacturers, Toyota and Nissan did not stop at cars for everyone (mwananchi), they then focused on luxury cars. Toyota got Lexus, while Nissan got Infiniti. The latter is not popular in Kenya.
One wishes our manufacturers could learn a lesson from Datsun 120Y. Quality sells and customers define quality in their own way. Reliability and durability win for cars. What would be more exciting than passing a car to the next generation, just like a house or a plot?
The rise of other car manufacturers like Hyundai from Korea or BYD from China brought competition, but quality guarded the Japanese cars like Ndung’u’s. What guards our products from competition? Got a product that espouses quality like the old car? Talk to us.