Stupidity Watch 1

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...

     At the 1985 Tokyo Motor Show there was one car that everyone was talking about, a small concept car called the Nissan Be-1, shown in pumpkin yellow and designed by Naoki Sakai of Water Design. Two years later Nissan would produce the concept car as the first of a limited series of cars called Pike Cars, in 1987 and 1988 they produced 10,000 Nissan Be-1s, in 1989 and 1990 they produced more than 51,000 Paos, and in 1991 they produced 20,000 Figaros, all designed by Naoki Sakai. Yet when Naoki Sakai designed his first car the Nissan Be-1 he had never designed a car before and in fact didn't even have a driver's license. He had worked in fashion and industrial design, and designed the Olympus O camera in 1988, and a retro-futuristic motorcycle called the Suzuki SW-1 in 1992.      In the early 80s Nissan held a contest between three teams, one an all under 30 Nissan team, one Italian design team, and Naoki Sakai's Water Design. Naoki Sakai is a pioneer...