The grilles on these early Juniors consist of seven horizontal bars and three vertical bars in a section between the headlight surrounds, and below that is a wide horizontal strip with four horizontal slots cut into it. The grille and the strip underneath it are painted white, and the headlight surrounds are chrome plated. In 1964 a change was made and the grille was then chrome plated and the strip under it was painted the same colour as the body. This model also had a red Junior badge mounted to the grille. The front bumper bar is painted white and has a slot for an emergency crank handle above the number plate.
The badges on the side of the vehicle say Nissan Junior. If it is the 1900 version there will be a 1900 badge under the Nissan Junior badge, if it is a 1500 there will be no badge indicating engine size. The wheels on the early 1962 Juniors were painted the same colour at the body of the vehicle, after the 1964 update the wheels were painted silver.
The engines used for the 40 series were the same as the B140 Junior, with the main engine being the 1883cc H series engine which produced 92hp, and a base model engine which was the 77hp 1488cc G series engine.
The Junior's main sales rival in Japan, and through Asia and Australia, was the similarly sized Toyota Stout. The sales of Nissan's smaller commercial vehicles such as the Datsun 220 and 320 sold in much larger quantities than Toyota's equivalent models, but when it came to the larger sized pickup trucks the Stout comfortable beat the Junior in sales. The Junior was as good as, if not better than the Stout, but a lot of sales were lost thanks to two parts of this truck's name. The name Junior leads one to believe that this was a small truck, when it certainly was not. The name Junior was also a rather unserious name for a fairly serious truck. The other problem was the decission to market it as a Nissan. Nissan meant something in Japan, but in the rest of the world the Datsun name was becoming well established and respected. Rather than cash in on this new reputation Datsun had earned they instead launched a new brand name for many markets, which people did not recognise. The plan was to sell small vehicles such as the Bluebird, Fairlady and 320 pickup models as Datsuns and to sell the larger vehicles such as the Junior, Caball and Cedric as a Nissan. In most export markets this continued until about 1966, when all these Nissans were rebadged as Datsuns.
The 40 series Junior was in production until 1965, when it was replaced with the 41 series Junior, which was essentially the same vehicle but with a slightly larger engine.
