To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Nissan bringing the Juke crossover to market, the company hired artist Owen Gildersleeve to construct an origami copy of a Juke. Like all good ideas, cars start out as sketches on a piece of paper. This time around, the paper plays an integral part in the final product, as well.
The Juke was the originator of the compact-crossover craze. Unveiled in 2010, the Juke's wacky styling and diminutive-yet-usable proportions proved quite popular with buyers around the world. Currently, nearly every automaker produces a segment competitor, and people seem to be more than eager to scoop them up in staggering numbers.
Nissan folds together an origami Juke using more than 2,000 pieces of paper (pictures)
See all photos
Gildersleeve and his team spent 200 hours creating the origami Juke, using over 2,000 individual pieces of paper. Parts of a standard Juke were used as templates, but the final product is crafted entirely of paper. There's no Juke hiding underneath all those folds -- a basic skeleton was created to hold each paper panel. Sadly, that means there is no interior.
Furthermore, this creation is technically papercraft and not genuine origami, as it involves multiple pieces of paper and glue, but feel free to discuss those finer semantic points with the Japanese automaker's PR department. (Read about a similar papercraft car from Lexus here.)
The Juke is the second-most popular Nissan model in Europe, selling over 700,000 models since its inception. It's awfully popular in the US, too -- according to Good Car Bad Car, the Juke's sales numbers have remained relatively consistent since launch, selling between 2,000 and 4,000 units nearly every month since October 2010.