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Nissan celebrates Juke’s fifth birthday with paper model

Nissan is celebrating five years of the Juke crossover with something other than a bottle of bubbly and birthday cake.

Instead, the Japanese manufacturer decided to adopt the homegrown tradition of origami (derived from the words ‘Oru’ meaning ‘to fold’ and ‘Kami’ meaning ‘paper’) to make a life-sized model of the car.

The model was built by British paper artist Owen Gildersleeve and is made from 2,000 folded pieces of paper carefully constructed over a period of 200 hours. It features the exact same dimensions as the current Juke.

The Juke – first deliveries of which began in October 2010 – is Nissan’s second best-selling model after the Qashqai, which was the world’s first crossover. 150,000 Jukes have been sold in the UK alone and 700,000 across Europe.

“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,” Gildersleeve said.

He added: “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 paper Juke was unveiled during the World Origami Days event, which celebrates the art of paper folding and runs from the 24th of October to the 11th of November 2015.

Nissan’s Sunderland manufacturing plant will continue to produce the next-generation Juke into 2020, with £100 million in investment secured.

Lexus performed a similar stunt earlier this year when it made a fully drivable cardboard model of its IS model.

Origami Nissan Juke: Folded in Britain video

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