How Naoki Sakai Saved Automotive Design with Puff Pants
How Naoki Sakai Saved Automotive Design with Puff Pants By Robert Korczynski For the 40th anniversary of the release of the Nissan Be-1 concept car at the 1985 Tokyo Motor Show, an automotive profile written by Alex Kwanten was published on hagerty.com in December of 2025. The piece covered the entire Pike Factory lineup, including the Pao and the Figaro, and talked to Nissan engineers, not Naoki Sakai. The article focused heavily on the internal staff's engineering and assembly efforts, directly quoting Yoshiro Kobata, who led the design team at the factory. In the profile, Kobata noted, "No one imagined it would become popular," adding that his crew was trepidatious about public reaction to a car hastily prepped for the show. While the article highlighted the frantic scramble to build the cars, it downplays the outside creative spark that made the project possible in the first place, Naoki Sakai and Water Design, unlike every other article that has been written over t...