JDM Trivia #6: 1981 Nissan Drive Guide System

This weeks trivia is all about the 1981 Nissan Drive Guide system which was basically a crude navigation system for the Nissan Skyline DR30 and the Nissan Gazelle and Silvia S12. Nobody took a wild guess at the teaser from last week, but I’ll get to the purpose of the antenna in this episode!

In the 1970s the most advanced navigational system in your car was…a road atlas and a compass! Of course the US military was solving that problem by shooting up GPS satellites from 1973 onwards but the automotive industry also made attempts. In the 1980s in Germany and the US companies used antennas to send signals via various radio frequencies but this was very costly. Meanwhile in Japan Toyota, Honda and Nissan made their own attempts to solve the car navigation question.

1980s Japanese Navigational systems

In 1981 Honda implemented a system called Electro Gyrocator and this system breathed tech savvy Hondaness as the system used an Helium gas gyroscope to detect both rotation and movement. The complex system required printed plastic maps and if you are interested in more photos and background information, Japanese Nostalgic Car blog wrote an article about it. In the same year Toyota implemented a system on their Celica XX but I was not able to find any information about how that system worked.