01
Origins
Prince's Homy of 1965 was the company's forward-control people-mover — a solid one-box design for crews and large families in Japan's motorising boom — and it outlived its maker's independence: after the 1966 Nissan merger the Homy continued under Nissan, and when Nissan launched its own Caravan in 1973 the two lines merged into decades of near-identical twins, the Homy name retiring only in 1999. The van thus traces Japanese industrial consolidation in sheet metal: a Prince design absorbed, twinned, and gradually dissolved into its acquirer's identity. Unglamorous by definition, the Homy-Caravan lineage moved Japan's workers, tour groups and airport shuttles for half a century — the merger's most durable, least celebrated dividend.
2001-2005 NISSAN CARAVAN · TTTNIS · Public domain
