robertpool wrote:Fireman wrote:Giblets On Croute wrote:What abour Weirs the Datsun people. Did they not have a showroom on Dumbarton Road near Byres Road/Church street?
Seem to remember being in there late 80's when it became Nissan.
I remember that showroom if you mean the one at the corner of Thurso St & Dumbarton Rd when it was Peter Holmes, a BL dealer - but that's going back a while.
The Datsun story is an interesting one - those of us may remember that there used to be a whole pile of Nissan/Datsun garages in Glasgow which were all little independents - Bob Rae, Drivers, Weir's, Peter Holmes etc. - they all sourced their cars from a rather infamous eastern European businessman called Octav Botnar, who had built up the whole Nissan import business since the late 60s. Not content with this, in the late '80s he decided to buy out all the little dealers as well, with a promise they'd get a bigger slice of the action. So this new super-dealer was called AFG (which you also may remember), but in truth what happened is that a lot of these little dealers saw their businesses closed and destroyed completely.
Needless to say, Nissan in Japan was none too happy of the situation as their good name was being drawn into the whole mess, and given they now had a factory in Sunderland and an R&D operation in this country, they decided to do a no-brainer and cut both Botnar and AFG loose by bringing the import business in-house and set up their own distribution network as well - primarily by giving new franchises to your Arnold Clarks, your Reg Vardys and so on. They therefore starved AFG of stock, put them out of business and is primarily why all of the original AFG-branded Nissan dealers all seemingly disappeared overnight.