Datsun Brought The First Compact Truck To The US In 1959

The pickup truck itself enjoys a long and illustrious history in the U.S., with examples of the configuration dating back over 100 years. Henry Ford clocked that owners were converting their Model Ts to sport a pickup-style body, and so opted to cut out the middle man, and offer the Model T with a pickup body as a factory option from 1925 onward.

However, the compact pickup truck didn't arrive until much later, until the very late 1950s. By this point, Ford's venerable F-Series had already been established for a decade, and competition from the likes of Chevrolet and GMC was also rife, with both Task Force and Blue Chip trucks appearing in the mid '50s. Despite a plethora of home-grown and capable choices already on the market, a small Japanese automaker by the name of Datsun opted to join the fold in 1958, by debuting a far smaller alternative at that year's L.A. Auto Show.

The truck in question was the Datsun Pickup 220. It was both based upon and sold alongside the Sedan 210, and both were powered by a diminutive 1.0-liter inline-4 engine. This marked the birth of the compact truck segment in the U.S., with Datsun beating native brands like Ford and Chevrolet to the punch by in excess of a decade.

Every single aspect of the Datsun 220 Pickup delivers upon being compact. Its physical size is laughably small in comparison to today's compacts, it measuring up at 147.3 inches long, 57.7 inches wide, and 64.0 inches tall. Lining one up against a 2027 Ford Maverick, which sits at 199.8 inches long, 72.6 inches wide, and 68.7 inches tall, must make the Blue Oval look like a full-size in comparison.

That's not to knock the Maverick, we just don't really think it's that small. Certainly not in comparison to the little Datsun, which, as a result of its diminutive dimensions, only tipped the scales at 1,367 pounds. It could also seat two, and boasted a maximum load capacity of 1,874 pounds.

Naturally, its engine was also something of a miniature marvel, the 1.0-liter lump spitting out just 34 horsepower at 4,400 rpm, alongside 48 pound-feet of torque, which came in much earlier, at 2,400 rpm. That grunt was good enough to see the 220 Pickup achieve a top speed of 56 mph, with power being sent through a three-speed manual transmission.

Hardly a performance gem, then, but that didn't matter. The Datsun's 'C' engine was nicknamed the 'stone engine,' famed for its durability. Under the hood of its sister sedan, the 1.0-liter lump managed to prove quite capable in Australian rally events, bringing victory despite its humble output.

Being the first compact truck ever offered in the U.S., in addition to the first Datsun model sold stateside, the 220 Pickup truck is undeniably important. Sadly, it's all but forgotten by most, probably due to the arrival of Ford's Mazda-derived Courier and Chevrolet's ahead-of-its-time LUV pickup in the early 1970s. These trucks helped launch a compact boom, by which point the Datsun was old and irrelevant; Nissan dropping the Datsun name in the '80s probably didn't help encourage its memory to linger either.

Today, the 220 Pickup is a remarkably scarce vehicle. A couple have passed through Bring A Trailer throughout the years, the last selling back in 2019 for $13,000, but it's not a model that appears all that often. What has lasted, though, is Nissan's presence in the U.S. truck market.

While the automaker might not offer a compact right now, it certainly did toy with the idea of an all-electric compact truck in the early 2020s, and throughout the years, various compacts have followed in the 220's tire tracks. Perhaps most notably was the Hardbody of the '80s and early '90s, which was superseded by the first-gen Frontier, which debuted as a compact before transitioning into the midsize we know today.