Nissan creates full-size origami car to celebrate Juke’s 5th birthday

They say the best ideas start with just a blank piece of paper.

Celebrating the model’s 5^th anniversary – and its market-leading sales of over 700,000 – Nissan and a British paper artist have collaborated on a unique project to create a full-scale Origami Juke.

In a nod to Nissan’s Japanese heritage and inspired by the very first steps of car design – getting ideas onto paper – artist Owen Gildersleeve hand-built the intricate replica model from paper to the exact dimensions of the current Juke. Owen took more than 200 hours and folded more than 2,000 pieces of paper to create the detailed sculpture.

The Origami Juke features the same bold design cues – such as the wheel fenders, lights and grille – that give the real-life model its distinctive character.

Artist Owen Gildersleeve said: “This was a great project to work on – hard work but very rewarding. As a celebration piece it draws on so many influences, such as the origami focus inspired by Nissan’s Japanese roots. Using so many individual pieces of paper to create the overall structure also represents the thousands of people who helped bring the Nissan Juke into reality and the thousands who continue to do so right here in the UK.”

The Juke’s bold, standout styling has been a key factor in the model’s success. Nissan created a brand new ‘compact crossover’ sector with the launch of the car, offering motorists something completely different, in terms of design, to any other vehicle on the road.

The Juke, which is built in Nissan’s plant in Sunderland, reaches its fifth birthday this year. Since first deliveries began in October 2010, more than 150,000 Juke models have been sold in the UK alone, with over 700,000 total sales across Europe, making it the continent’s best-selling compact crossover.

The Juke’s longer-term future in Britain was recently secured when Nissan confirmed that the Sunderland plant would produce the next-generation Juke benefiting from a further £100 million investment in the Sunderland facility and securing the plant into 2020.

Darryl Scriven, Design Manager at Nissan’s Design Centre for Europe, said: “The first step of any car design involves putting pencil to paper. From that simple start, it’s a complex journey to production involving hundreds of skilled people, thousands of man-hours and millions in investment. So we think it’s very apt that on its fifth birthday, we celebrate the Nissan Juke with a tribute that harks back to that simple, but bold, first step, all carried out with Nissan’s signature innovation and excitement of course.”