Subaru began selling four-wheel-drive-equipped Leone station wagons in the United States as 1975 models, and each passing year after that saw more American car shoppers deciding that they wanted cars—not trucks, cars—with power going to all four wheels. Toyota got into that game with the Tercel 4WD wagon, sold here for the 1983 through 1988 model years, and I’ve found one of those cars in its final parking space in Denver.

The very affordable Tercel first went on sale in the United States as a 1980 model, badged as the Corolla Tercel at first (in order to take advantage of the name recognition for the unrelated Corolla, which had been a strong seller since its American debut in 1966).

The original Tercel had an interesting powertrain layout, with a longitudinally-mounted engine driving the front wheels via a V-drive-style transmission that sent power to a differential assembly mounted below the engine. This resulted in an awkward-looking high hood but also meant that sending power to a rear drive axle was just a matter of adding a rear-facing output shaft to the transmission.

Making a four-wheel-drive Tercel wasn’t difficult with that rig plus a few off-the-shelf parts, and Toyota decided to add a wagon version of the Tercel at the same time. This was the Sprinter Carib, which debuted in Japan as a 1982 model. The Tercel 4WD Wagon (as it was known in North America) hit American Toyota showrooms as a 1983 model.

A front-wheel-drive version of the Tercel Wagon was also available in the United States, though not in Japan; most of the Tercel Wagons I find during my junkyard travels are four-wheel-drive versions.

This car has four-wheel-drive, not all-wheel-drive (as we understand the terms today), which means that the driver had to manually select front-wheel-drive for use on dry pavement. Failure to do so would result in damage to the tires or worse. American Motors began selling the all-wheel-drive Eagle as a 1980 model, with Audi following a year later with its Quattro AWD system, while Toyota didn’t begin selling true AWD cars in the United States until its All-Trac system debuted in the 1988 model year.

The Tercel 4WD Wagon sold very well in snowy regions of North America, despite strong competition from Subaru as well as from the 4WD-equipped wagons offered by Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi.

This one is a top-of-the-Tercel-range SR5 model with just about every possible option. While the base 1986 Tercel FWD hatchback started at a miserly $5448 ($15,586 in today’s dollars), the MSRP for a 1986 Tercel SR5 4WD wagon was $8898 ($25,456 after inflation).

One of the coolest features of the SR5 version of the ’86 Tercel 4WD Wagon was the six-speed manual transmission, with its “Extra Low” gear. If you’re a Tercel 4WD Wagon enthusiast (many are), this is the transmission you want for your car!

The SR5’s plaid seat upholstery looked great, as an added bonus.

These cars were reasonably capable off-road, though the lack of power made them quite slow on any surface. This is a 1.5-liter 3A-C SOHC straight-four, rated at 62 horsepower and 76 pound-feet (probably more like 55 horsepower at Denver’s elevation).

The curb weight of this car was a wispy 2290 pounds and so it wasn’t nearly as pokey as, say, a Rabbit Diesel, but I’ve owned several 1983-1988 Tercel Wagons and I can say from personal experience that they require a great deal of patience on freeway on-ramps.

I can also say from experience that the Tercel Wagon obliterates every one of its anywhere-near-similarly-priced competitors in the reliability and build-quality departments. This one made it to a pretty good 232,503 miles during its career, and I’ve found a junkyard ’88 with well over 400,000 miles on its odometer.

The air conditioning added $655 to the price tag, or $1874 in today’s dollars. This one has an aftermarket radio, but SR5 4WD Wagon buyers for 1986 got a pretty decent AM/FM radio with four speakers as standard equipment. If you wanted to play cassettes, that was $186 more ($532 now).

The Tercel went to a third generation during the 1988 model year (both the second- and third-generation Tercels were sold in the United States as 1988 models), becoming a cousin of the Japanese-market Starlet and getting an ordinary engine orientation in the process. The 4WD Wagon went away, to be replaced by the Corolla All-Trac Wagon. The 1996 Tercel ended up being the last new car available in the United States with a four-speed manual transmission, by the way.

These cars make fun projects today, though finding rust-free examples can be a challenge.

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Call it a cyclecar or a microcar, the Suminoe Engineering Works Flying Feather was the right car at the right time for war-ravaged Japan of the 1940s. The driving force behind the car was Yutaka Katayama, now known as the father of the Datsun 240Z and the man who brought Nissan to the United States. However, his imaginative design met with a quick demise after only 200 examples were ever produced. The Flying Feather has become a forgotten car that should be held to much loftier status.

“Mr. K” was a Nissan man. Since 1935, he had worked for the auto manufacturer doing advertising and promotional work. After Nissan restarted production following WWII with its prewar Austin 7 DA and DB variants, plans were afoot to dive deeper into the Austin portfolio to bring more up-market sedans to Japan. Nissan was eyeing Austin’s A40 and A50, both larger cars than the ancient Austin 7.

But in 1947, Japan was struggling with ramping up production of even the most basic products. Raw materials, supply chain issues, a collapsed economy, and generally dismal working and living conditions didn’t translate to eager buyers of large English sedans. Katayama knew this, and felt that a bare-bones economy car was the way to kick off not only the rebirth of Nissan but also that of Japan. It was the same rationale that produced Germany’s Beetle and France’s 2CV. Both vehicles would begin production in 1947, the same year in which Katayama began envisioning their Japanese counterpart.

Nissan designer Ryuichi Tomiya was of a like mind with Katayama. Well-known throughout Japan for his various automotive and industrial designs, the future director of the Tomiya Research Institute would go on to design several important cars including the Fuji Cabin three-wheeler. Back in the 1940s, he was not up for rehashing Austins even though Nissan was dead set on going upmarket with the larger Austin A40 sedan.

Tomiya and Katayama hatched a plan to break from Nissan and start their own automobile company, focusing on affordable but sprightly commuter cars. They settled on a design they called the Flying Feather: An extremely simple, lightweight, two-seater with the presence of a peculiar yet sporting coupe. Yes, it would run motorcycle wheels and tires. And, yes, power would come from a puny one-cylinder air-cooled Nissan engine, located in the rear of the car, no less. But since the vehicle would not be much more than two motorcycles stitched together, it would be simple to repair, easy to build, and peppy enough to satisfy those who needed basic transportation.

By 1950 Katayama was able to produce his first prototype, a doorless convertible somewhat like a stylized Jeep on motorcycle wheels. His first problem was getting the prototype out of the second-story shop it was built in, but once Nissan saw the elegant little doorless convertible, executives were impressed, and they agreed to produce the Flying Feather. Nissan was ready to produce its own version of Austin’s A40, and the Flying Feather would broaden the company’s portfolio by providing a smaller, cheaper option.

What appeared to be a solid production plan quickly fell apart after Katayama brought food to workers who were striking at a Nissan assembly plant to protest poor working conditions and constant interruptions for lack of materials. Nissan quickly parted ways with Mr. K—and his Flying Feather.

Undeterred, Katayama and Tomiya struck out on their own. A second, more stylish prototype would be the basis for the production-spec Flying Feather. Bug-eye headlights blended nicely into the hood, or frunk. A tapering body incorporated flares covering the front tires, with the body moving out as it flowed to the rear. The design ended with tall air vents chopped off at an angle. With large wheel openings for those big motorcycle wheels, it presented impressive overall proportions, adding to its diminutive though sporting look.

The refined prototype now had doors, independent front and rear suspension, and an air-cooled 350cc V-twin engine offering 12.5 hp. In this final form, the Flying Feather weighed 935 pounds. It was light as a proverbial feather, with better performance than the first design.

The windows swung up on hinges, rather than rolling up and down, and no radio or heater was offered. There were friction shocks to suppress jounce, and brakes only at the rear. The interior was spartan: The frames of the seats were exposed—from the side, you can see the springs—and covered with a fabric pad that served as upholstery.

After shopping the car around to suppliers, Katayama landed at Suminoe Engineering Works. It produced interiors and small bits to Nissan and agreed to produce the Flying Feather. Adding additional air beneath the wings of Katayama’s project, the Japan Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) agreed to help nurture Japan’s own “people’s car.”

A production version of the Flying Feather—the “smallest, cheapest, and most economical practical car in the world”—was the highlight of the 1954 Tokyo Auto Show. Unfortunately, things quickly fell apart.

The MITI support never materialized. Then, Suminoe lost its contract to supply interiors to Nissan, which bankrupted the supplier and pretty much ended any possibility of producing more Flying Feathers. In the end, only around 200 were made. Very few have survived, and only a handful of restored examples exist today.

Though Katayama’s dream of an affordable car for Japan was gone, he wasn’t done with ambitious projects. He mended fences with Nissan, starting as team manager for Datsun’s two 210 entries in the 1958 Mobilgas trials in Australia. In 1960, Nissan sent him to America to oversee the launch of the Datsun brand. Though strained in these early years, Katayama’s efforts as the first president of Nissan of America laid the foundation for the expansion of the company. The Datsun 510, the 1600 and 2000 sports cars, the successful racing alliance with Peter Brock’s BRE Racing in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the development of the 240Z all happened under the stewardship of Mr. K.

In 2009, at 100 years old, Katayama remained immersed in the machinations of the car industry, offering his take on the impact of the Mazda Miata as the 240Z’s successor. He died at the age of 105, his reputation as a leader in the development of the Japanese and American automotive landscape well established. And while the Flying Feather is but a sidenote of his illustrious career, it really was a milestone in the reemergence of Japan and its burgeoning automotive industry.

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In this installment of Reputation Management, we go beyond North American markets for a new story. It’s still about the complex world of automotive retail, but now the situation gets rather seedy in the F&I (finance and insurance) department of a chain of used car dealerships. Even worse, this company has been a household name in Japan since 1976.

In general terms, experiences in the F&I department are generally the worst part for customers on their journey to buying a vehicle. This is because you’ve already agreed on a price with the salesperson, but now have to pay/finance the vehicle, insure it, and add various warranties to minimize future cash outlays. Some items can be necessary (road hazard warranties for 20+ inch wheels) but most take us back to the F&I scene from the movie Fargo.

Transparency is almost impossible to find in an F&I office, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently having a hard time changing that for American consumers. The same truths apply to one of the largest used car retailers in Japan, a company that you can think of as parallel to Carmax here in the United States.

This particular Japanese F&I scandal stems from the unmitigated greed of senior management and collusion with a very large insurance provider. The former centers around damaging and/or padding the repair bill of vehicles with a warranty policy. While some insurance companies balked at the charges, one of them was seemingly okay with this troubling behavior. In return, the F&I departments agreed to only sell warranties from this particular insurance company. The end result was a massive fraud, and Japanese citizens were the victims, as they ultimately paid the tab via higher premiums.

The insurance provider in question has a CEO who is resigning by the end of this month, while the retailer’s nepotistic management team said sayōnara back in 2023. These changes happened for good reason, as Japan’s Fair Trade Commission (also FTC!) reportedly noted “violations on an unheard-of scale” by the auto retailer.

After this informative video hit YouTube, there was news this company might have a brighter future in the long term. Considering its decades of history with Japanese consumers, perhaps the relationship is salvageable.

For now, we can read the reviews like tea leaves to evaluate the short-term prospects of the company. So let’s scan Google Maps and learn a thing or two about poor retailing practices from the land of some of the world’s most trusted automotive brands.

Sakuras in Plain Sight

The word “sakura” means cherry blossom, which is the flower that even we Yanks appreciate around the country come springtime. But it is also a slang term for a fake customer who blends in with the general public. Sakuras are a bad sign, perhaps even worse than this high-pressure tactic to get a would-be customer into the F&I department to close the deal.

The world of online reviews can be harsh when sakuras are spotted. This might be a revenge review (my own term I just made up) to the widespread (seemingly global) practice of paying for good reviews. Doing so improves your ranking on Google Maps, and gives customers more trust in your business. The sakura industry is so big there are websites boldly proclaiming to produce good ratings for your business, but as the YouTube video above explains, this company’s sakuras were likely created in-house.

That is absolutely not strange, as fake reviews are usually from singular accounts made by employees, friends, family, etc. This retailer was in the news when this review was published, so this reviewer is clearly being sarcastic. I wonder if Google Translate softened the blow when it comes to the original tone of this review.

Tree Controversy

At the alleged behest of the CEO’s son, this company poisoned trees so motorists could see its inventory on the lot. See below—there are now tiny bushes where the stumps lie, and just a single tree stands next to the showroom.

This is why being a store manager (a general manager in the U.S.) is a tough gig: You need free advertising to ensure that everyone knows you both exist and that you have cars that people want. But do you kill trees to make it happen?

A seasoned general manager knows that their store’s actions can raise the ire of locals, and killing trees gets the media and the government involved (usually in that order). Apparently that’s not an issue for this company, because they’ve blurred the lines between right and wrong elsewhere. Why not commit a little herbicide in the process?

About That F&I Fraud

Here’s an example of the counterpoint to a sakura: a revenge review that may or may not have any grounding in an actual experience at the dealership.

This comment about the fraud points to a harsh reality about the car business. No matter how sketchy the operation may be, people still need to search locally for car dealerships in their area. And a company with such a storied (as it were) history is still marketing its vehicles to locals, dangling a lure that is both tempting and necessary for many citizens.

One Bad Apple?

A vehicle is a necessity for many citizens, indeed. Being in a hurry to buy a new car is a recipe for getting a bad deal, because there’s a level of urgency that hurts your negotiation strategy.

But it’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax when your salesperson shows up at your workplace, expressing appreciation for your buying a car that was likely headed to auction. Hopefully this salesperson was at least a good tipper at the karaoke bar.

Hey, it’s the same salesperson in the previous review! Looks like the F&I fraud, stemming from overcharging an insurance company for repairs, has now manifested itself in poorly installed (or poor quality?) aftermarket coilover shocks on one of their vehicles in inventory. I suspect aftermarket parts are the bane of any insurer, so this was likely an easy rug to pull out from underneath any insurance company … not just the one you’re getting a quid pro quo from.

The Whole Thing Stinks

The YouTube explainer video above suggests that employee turnover was high because of aggressive goals set by the company. You can expect that seasoned automotive retailers will take jobs with better car dealers, or find sales positions in another industry. I suspect I’m not the first person to tell you that younger, inexperienced employees put up with more rubbish from senior management than older, tenured staff. The same truth applies to this dealership.

Premium car dealerships often task staff members with the sole purpose of customer support. That’s unlikely for cheaper brands, or for a used-car dealership like this one. The last sentence is also telling, as who wouldn’t want a free oil change just for leaving a Google review? That’s technically not the same as planting a sakura, but it accomplishes the same thing for the cost of oil, filter, and a little bit of labor.

The age of this review is telling, as sloppy accounting for these repairs happened well before this company’s chickens came home to roost.

Not every customer is desperate, unsophisticated, or technically ignorant of the differences between a good and a bad purchase experience. This individual is clearly one of those lucky customers. But we don’t all get to buy from a Lexus dealership or even a reputable Chevrolet one. And we can’t all buy a one-price Tesla or anything we want from Carvana, though avoiding the tech company business model might be a good thing. (For reasons here, here, and here.)

Those who grew up in a family with no other alternatives than the buy-here-pay-here lots may not know any better. It’s a sad reality I learned head-on when I volunteered at a local high school, and when I taught middle-school-aged kids about F&I for a fintech startup company. I have no knowledge of automotive retailing in Japan, but I assume a similar issue swirls above Japanese society and this embattled automotive retailer.

No matter your circumstances, getting scammed by a sales or service department should never be allowed. Profit is one thing, but doing so at the expense of society is another. While that’s generally a gray area, this episode of Reputation Management suggests that fraud can also be crystal-clear.

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In Colorado, where I live, four-wheel-drive Subarus have been beloved ever since the first 4WD Leone-based models appeared in showrooms in the mid-’70s. Because of their popularity in the Centennial State for nearly 50 years, the car graveyards along the I-25 corridor amount to museums of the history of the Pleiades-badged brand in America. Today we’ll take a look at an absolutely loaded Subaru wagon, found in a boneyard just outside of Denver.

When we talk about U.S.-market Subarus of the 1970s and 1980s, we need to first discuss the way that Fuji Heavy Industries named their cars on this side of the Pacific. The Leone, as it was known in Pacific markets, debuted in the United States as a 1972 model, but that name was never used here. At first, they were designated by their engine displacements, but soon each model was pitched as, simply, “the Subaru” with the trim levels (DL and GL were the best-known) used as de facto model names. The exception to this system was the Brat pickup, which first showed up as a 1978 model. Things in the American Subaru naming world became even more confusing when the non-Leone-derived XT appeared as a 1985 model followed by the Justy two years later, and the Leone finally became the Loyale here for its final years (1990-1994).

The Leone began its American career as a seriously cheap economy car, mocked in popular culture for its small size (but still getting a shout-out from Debbie Harry). Sponsorship of the U.S. Olympic Ski Team and gradual addition of size and features allowed Subaru to sell the higher-end Leone models for decent money as the 1980s went on.

In 1987, the absolute cheapest member of the Leone family in the United States was the base front-wheel-drive three-door-hatchback, coming in at an MSRP of $5857 (about $16,345 in 2024 dollars). Known to Subaru dealers as the STD, it was disappointingly never badged as such.

At the very top of the 1987 U.S.-market Leone ziggurat stood today’s Final Parking Space subject: the GL-10 Turbo 4WD Wagon. Its price started at an impressive $14,688, which comes to a cool $40,990 after inflation. A naturally-aspirated 1987 GL 4WD Wagon could be had for $10,767 ($30,047 in today’s money). In fact, the only way to spend more on a new 1987 Subaru (before options) was to forget about the Leone and buy an XT GL-10 Turbo 4WD at $15,648 ($43,669 now).

There weren’t many options you’d need on the feature-stuffed GL-10, but this car’s original buyer decided it was worth paying an additional $955 ($2665 in today’s bucks) for the automatic transmission. That pushed its out-the-door cost to within spitting distance of the price of admission for a new Volkswagen Quantum Syncro Wagon and its $17,320 ($48,335 in 2024) price.

Subaru was an early adopter of turbocharging for U.S.-market cars, with the first turbocharged Leone coupes and wagons appearing here in 1983. This car has a 1.8-liter SOHC boxer-four rated at 115 horsepower and 134 pound-feet, pretty good power in its time for a vehicle that scaled in at just 2,530 pounds (that’s about 700 fewer pounds than a new Impreza hatchback, to give you a sense of how much bulkier the current crop of new “small” cars is).

Subaru was just in the process of introducing a true all-wheel-drive system as we understand the term today in its U.S.-market vehicles when this car was built, and both 4WD and AWD systems were installed in Subarus sold here from the 1987 through 1994 model years. (Beginning with the 1996 model year, all new Subarus sold in the United States were equipped with AWD.) Subaru fudged the definition on its badging for a while by using a character that could be read as either a 4 or an A, as seen in the photo above.

I’ve documented a discarded 1987 GL-10 Turbo 4WD Coupe that had genuine AWD (called “full-time four-wheel-drive” by Subaru and some other manufacturers at the time), and it had prominent “FULL-TIME 4WD” badging and a differential-lock switch. This car just has the 4WD switch on the gearshift lever, like earlier 4WD Subarus with automatics, so I am reasonably sure that it has a 4WD system that requires the driver to switch to front-wheel-drive on dry pavement in order to avoid damage to tires or worse. But even as the current owner of two Subarus and a longtime chronicler of junked Fuji Heavy Equipment hardware, I cannot say for certain about the weird 1987 model year. Please help us out in the comments if you know for sure!

This car has the sort of science-fiction-grade digital dash that was so popular among manufacturers (particularly Japanese ones) during the middle 1980s.

It also has what a 1987 car shopper would have considered a serious factory audio system, with cassette track detection and a trip computer thrown in for good measure. This stuff was standard on the GL-10 that year, and you needed that righteous radio to fully appreciate the popular music of the time.

The odometer shows just over 120,000 miles, and the interior wasn’t too thrashed, so why was one of the coolest Subaru wagons of the 1980s residing in this place? First of all, there’s a glut of project Leones available in Colorado’s Front Range at any given moment. Second, all of the most devoted enthusiasts of these cars in this region already have hoards stables of a dozen with no space for more; I let my many friends who love these cars know about this one and they plucked at least a few parts from it before it got crushed (sorry, I shot these photos last summer and this car has already had its date with the crusher).

So, if you’re a vintage Subaru aficionado living where the Rust Monster stands 100 feet tall, head to the region between Cheyenne and Colorado Springs and find yourself a project Leone to bring home. We’ve got plenty here!

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Spending time in a collection of just one brand’s cars can be an interesting experience. Whether they’re from a specific period or they cover a greater storyline, there is much to learn from seeing and thinking about the progression from one model to another and how such development contributes to a carmaker’s arc. Honda is a brand that leans into things like that, which helps to explain why it chose to renovate and refocus its museum, the Honda Collection Hall, in Tochigi, Japan.

The whole museum received a makeover, which included reorganizing the exhibits to better tell the story of Honda in a linear manner. The first exhibit that welcomes visitors is likely the last one you’d expect: A full-scale mockup of a HondaJet Elite II, which allows anyone who steps through the door to experience what flying private business is like, if only for a minute. Of course, that is not the main attraction, and the rest of the exhibits are a little more our speed.

The museum is divided into four wings, each spanning roughly a decade and a half, beginning with the company’s 1948 founding and early bicycle-engine kits. Of course, things progressed into racing and mass production relatively quickly, leading to the Super Cub and Isle of Man TT efforts. From there it’s over to another wing for the early automobiles and Honda’s 1964 entry into Formula 1. Progress further still and you’ll enter the wing dedicated to the period between 1985 and 2000, an era defined by behind-the-scenes challenges and the development of the NSX sports car. The area covering 2000–present is focused on how Honda has widened its focus to so many things outside of the transportation sector.

Like any good museum, there are rotating exhibits, the first of which is a highlight of the early CB motorcycle lineup. That will be replaced in June by an exhibit focused on the NSR250R and other race replica models from the 1980s.

By itself, is the Honda Collection Hall enough to justify the plane ticket to the other side of the world? For brand diehards, sure. For the rest of us, if you find yourself in Japan for other reasons, add it to your itinerary. There is much to gain by strolling through the rich history of one of the automotive world’s most storied marques.

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Translation software often goofs when asked to turn Japanese into English. For instance, a label warning that a product is not safe for kids becomes “Do Not Eat Children.” Some things just don’t compute across the Pacific divide. Just thinking about how to concisely explain Japanese Kaido racers makes my brain hurt.

“People’s usual reaction is just to think it’s crazy,” says Keith Measures, “Just completely crazy. But it goes deeper than that.”

This past July, Measures and his friend Reid Olliffe, known simply by Rudeboy, hosted their second annual Summer Touring event for kaido racers in Vancouver, Canada. I’ll attempt a basic definition in a moment, but as a primer, I suggest drinking in the joyous madness of these ultra-low, ultra-wide, ultra-impractically-modified machines in the images below. Soak up the fat wheels, stretched tires, and exhaust pipes sized like Paul Bunyan’s chopsticks. The front splitter on Measures’ own Nissan looks like it was made to flip giant pancakes.

Piece of advice: Whatever you do, don’t call this style “bosozuku,” or at least not in front such a crew gathered here. Bosozuku is a foreigner’s catch-all for wildly styled machinery from Japan, but it’s not accurate. (The actual bosozuku were the frequently violent motorcycle gangs that rose to prominence in the 1970s. Think Japan’s version of the Hell’s Angels, and likewise with motorcycle culture on this side of the Pacific, some of that outlaw style trickled down into motorcycle and car modification.) In Japan, “bosozuku” still carries a whiff of hitting old ladies with nunchucks. Frowned-upon behavior.

Kaido Racers often flout the law with their extreme modifications, but they’re largely regarded as harmless in the way the leather-jacketed Sons Of Dentistry ride big Harleys on the weekends without raising alarm. “Kaido” is an older Japanese term for road or street, so a Kaido Racer is literally a street racer, although not in the Fast & Furious sense. The origins come from young Japanese enthusiasts modifying their street cars to resemble the touring car racing they were watching at Fuji Speedway and the like.

As an automotive subculture, Kaido Racers can claim a half-century of evolution and history. Visit Yokohama’s Daikoku parking area on a Sunday morning and you might see some older owners, still infatuated with the passions of their youth, proud of the enormous sums poured into their builds. The closest North American relative is perhaps low-rider or Kustom culture.

Here on the west coast of Canada and America, that enthusiasm skews young. The crowd here at the staging area for the Summer Cruise in Vancouver are mostly 20- or 30-somethings—young men and a few young women in Toyotas, Nissans, and Hondas. All of their cars are slammed to the ground on wide, small-diameter wheels.

(There’s also rolling golf green car made of plywood, but more on that later.)

For the most part, kaido racer style takes its inspiration from the Super Silhouette racers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. If you’re a student of the Nissan Skyline, you might recognize the gargantuan box flares of a Super Silhouette R31 Skyline in its signature red and black Tomica livery (Hot Wheels made a scale-sized tribute a few years ago). Some of this angular aero made its way onto the hero car of Seibu Keisatsu, a hard-boiled TV police show that was Japan’s answer to Miami Vice.

There were all kinds of other racing cars in this period, most of them with the same flared bodies and relatively small-diameter wheels. Kids started cutting up their street cars and getting together for late-night cruises, and a series of meets and magazines formed around the culture. There were different flavors, from the wide Grachan cars (for Grand Champion, like the racing machines) to the the narrow-bodied and brightly colored Fukoka styled cars with their hoods jutting forward like the brow of a giant space robot.

Kaido racer enthusiasts take their passion seriously. There is a right way to build a car and a wrong way. Every detail matters, and to an outsider, what makes a great kaido racer build correct can seem obscure or even arbitrary.

For Rudeman and Measures and their merry band of co-miscreants, uncovering Japan’s fifty-odd years of kaido racer culture is part archaeology, part art history. Their research pool? Rare magazines. A handful of experts. A growing pan-Pacific network of enthusiasts who love the obscure stuff. Gathered here today are kaido racer clubs who have driven from as far away as Los Angeles—even a guy who flew in from London. (England, not Ontario.)

Along with the seriousness, there’s an atmosphere of madcap fun to the scene. Between the couple of dozen cars here are thousands of dollars of rare wheels imported from Japan (replicas = heresy), and the high dollar rolling stock contrasts with hand-formed sheetmetal fixes, rust-rotted arches, and suspension modifications. They ruin both ride and handling, yes, neither of which are the point.

“I mean, this car is a joke,” says Measures, “But those wheels are five grand!”

The aforementioned golf car, apparently hiding a Geo Metro chassis underneath, zips off down the road for a pre-cruise shakedown run. Unsecured golf balls roll off the back and go bouncing all over the street.

It is a careful chorus of strict rules, terminology, and heritage, nevertheless inflected with wacky Japanese game show mayhem. The interior of Measures’ Nissan looks like he skinned the Abominable Snowman from the 1964 Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer TV special. A bunch of dudes in muscle shirts pose for photos with their pink roofless Tercel; they call themselves the “Team Sexy Cowboys.” There’s a smattering of JDM vans. Tents are scattered across the lawn like a music festival. Keith gets stung by a wasp’s nest in the bumper of the Nissan. Two guys doing a rudimentary alignment discover that the two tape measures they’re using differ by over half an inch.

Everyone is having the time of their lives, apart from the now-drenched-in-brake-cleaner wasps. Building actual racing machines is far more scientific stuff, if not an art whose measurement is shaving off seconds off around a race track. Even drifting displays less humor.

The kaido racers head off down the highway into the setting sun, bouncing on their impossibly low suspensions, scraping wheels on fenders, blasting tunes, and turning the usual parade of local grey-silver-white crossover traffic into a rolling disco. Many of them are skilled photographers, capturing these fleeting moments for social media.

The fact that this is happening in British Columbia is ironic, to say the least. The province’s road rules are notoriously strict. None of these machines would pass even a cursory roadside vehicle inspection. But even when one of the crew is pulled over for driving a little over the limit, the cop just shakes his head and lets everyone go.

It’s as if the kaido racers have been blessed by a meneki-neko—one of those waving-good-luck cats you find in sushi restaurants. Many of the cars have at least a lucky black Marchal headlight brand cat aboard.

Whether you’re an Alfa-Romeo purist, a Mopar Hemi fan, a vintage BMW propellor-head, or the kind of person who thinks the only good math is V-8-plus-carburetor, there’s something universal in this brand of car enthusiasm. Having fun with your friends on hot tarmac in the summer sun. Long nights, and maybe a little of the good kind of trouble. You just feel it, nothing lost in translation.

***

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Matthew Anderson is an American engineer with a penchant for backyard wrenching, weird and unloved cars, and crudely planned adventures, with a bit of world travel mixed in. We don’t ask him too many follow-up questions.

“If you can take it with you, you can have it.” That’s what my Japanese friend, Hiro, told me with respect to a certain transmission. The conversation took place a few days prior to me boarding a flight to Tokyo. I brought an extra duffel bag, figuring JDM car parts count as souvenirs.

The gearbox in question is a Toyota six-speed manual with a stock Torsen limited-slip differential. It happens to fit a specific A-series motor that is dear to my heart. My thought was to reinvent my old M3-gobbling Corolla track car from my N.C. State University days. And if that didn’t pan out, I could always pop it in my newly acquired JDM Carina!

Whatever the application, I’m incapable of turning down a free transmission—in any country—so I blindly accepted Hiro’s offer.

I arrived in Japan confused as to which meal was next, sat through two days packed full of work meetings in Nagoya, and all the while had no clue how one brings a Toyota gearbox onto a commercial airliner. How was I even going to get it onto public transportation? Would United Airlines be concerned about the weight? Remnants of gear oil? Would I have to break it into pieces? How would I even do that?

The plan, if you can even called it that

First, let’s start with the question of weight. A C160 transmission like this tips the scales at around 90 pounds, which is 15 pounds more than I was allowed, lest I incur another $400 in various baggage fees. I realized I could scrap the bell housing to knock it down by around 12 pounds; that meant simple removal of the ring gear and limited-slip—both easily wrapped in underwear for safe stashing in a checked bag. Fortunately, a second bag was included with my work-provided business-class ticket. The hard part would be tearing down the gearbox and stuffing it into my two pieces of luggage. You know, normal business-class traveler stuff.

With that idea partially sorted, a second question remained: How does one haul 120 pounds of metal and clothes, split between two bags, across three different public trains? I asked my work colleague, Isaka, if he could help me find a rolling cart similar to what I’d seen elderly Japanese women hauling around to transport large bags of seafood. We made our way though the labyrinth of underground shops and izakayas to a brightly lit, five-story mega shop called Bic-Camera. Jackpot! A chromed rolling transmission platform was mine for about 18 U.S. dollars.

Now, yes, the third question: Where would I break this six-speed into smaller, stowable pieces? Hiro assured me it would all work out, provided I met him in a precise place, at a precise time. Gulp.

The execution, if you can even it call it that

I left my Nagoya hotel room at around 5:45 a.m. and arrived in Yokohama at 9:27 a.m. (Trains in Japan are highly punctual.) I told my work colleagues to not wait up. I’d just meet them at Narita airport … hopefully. 

I de-trained right on time, and there was Hiro standing at the turnstile exit. When we got to the parking garage, he navigated a touchscreen menu that resulted in his diminutive blue Subaru Sambar van being automatically fetched via elevator from what I assume was the mantle layer of the planet Earth. We set off into a deluge of rain. Japanese classic rock played on the radio against the whine of a very tiny supercharger. 

Behind my seat, I noticed an assortment of tools and my dear C160 transmission. But where were we going? We soon pulled up to a nondescript garage in an industrial area. A moss-covered Porsche Junior tractor languished beside a cracked garage door.

I followed Hiro behind said door, where his friend Uchiwa-san was climbing into a prewar Lancia Lambda, green umbrella overhead the open top.

Unsure if this was all an elaborate hallucination, I looked around the shop. The place was packed full of vintage Italian projects, including a 25th Anniversary Lamborghini Countach and a Ferrari 365 Berlinetta Boxer on a lift. Amid this choice metal, on a concrete floor underneath a flat-twelve engine, we tore into my worthless Toyota six-speed.

Low-hanging fruit came first: We furiously pulled and bagged snap rings, brackets, speedometer drives, and so on. Things were moving rather quickly, right up until the bell housing protested. Its securing bolts came off fine, but the case halves wouldn’t split. Hammering, prying, heat—none of it cleaved the stubborn case. Uchiwa-san, a master of transaxles mainly for cars costing multiples of six figures, squatted next to us and smoked a cigarette. He said some things to Hiro, none of it comprehensible to a gaijin like me. It must have been brilliant, because a few minutes later we had located two hidden internal case bolts that also needed to be removed. A few wrench twists was all it took to split apart the case in a frenzy of bearings, shafts, and gears.

We stripped and trashed the bell housing, separated and dried whatever parts we could, wrapped it all in plastic, and stuffed it into my luggage. The bulk of the gearbox, cinched together with a ratchet strap, fit in my duffel bag. Everything else went into a rolling case, which on airport security’s X-ray must have set off some interesting alarm bells. 

Somehow, we had 30 minutes to spare before my next train, which left time to poke and prod Countach motors, a Pratt & Whitney Wasp radial engine, a Steyr-Puch Haflinger, and even a Ferrari 250 GTO engine awaiting rebuild. After we said our farewells, Hiro rushed me to the first of my three scheduled trains. Traffic stalled a block from the station, so I bailed and ran the rest of the way as fast as one can with a transmission strapped to an oscillating grocery cart.

I missed two trains along the way but somehow managed to reach Tokyo’s Narita International Airport without major delay. Now began the fun part: negotiations with United.

In a stroke of undeserved luck, my colleague Isaka spotted me in the terminal, dragging my mobile encampment. He ushered me to check-in, which began with bright, happy faces from the ticket agents. The smiles started to invert as I loaded the two small-yet-mysteriously-heavy packages onto the scale. It turns out that luggage seemingly wrapped by a toddler, with the mass density of a neutron star and bizarre weight distribution, raised some red flags. I don’t know what Isaka said, but this magnificent man managed to get my chunks of iron, wrapped in plastic and boxer briefs, two APPROVED tags.

To celebrate, Isaka and I ordered a beer and a large plate of sushi. Muscle relaxers might have been a better idea, because the real pain of this endeavor was waiting for me back on U.S. shores. Stay tuned!

***

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In the early hours of November 28, 1981, a crimson wedge flitted along the neon-lit streets of Tokyo. At a late-night cafe, a reporter sat nursing a coffee, nerves still jangling from the high-speed shotgun ride along the Tomei expressway. He could still hear the thunderous howl of the big-block V-8 behind driver and passenger, inches from the base of his skull. He sipped his coffee with shaking hands. It had felt like riding with the devil at your heels. Some distance away, at approximately 1:40 a.m., that devil caught up with Garry Mitsunaga and his red Pantera.

That’s how the story goes, anyway. Like most street racing myths, the facts are colored with embellishments and hyperbole.

At the moment of his death, Garry Arran Mitsunaga was already a legend in the Japanese dragstrip and top-speed racing scene. He was an American, born in Hawaii and employed by the Harman Kardon audio group. The company sent him to Tokyo in 1975 to work for one of its Japanese divisions, in sales. Then thirty years old, Mitsunaga was affable and shrewd enough to be a leading salesman at the branch—this despite his limited knowledge of Japanese.

Students of Japanese car culture likely have a particular image in their head of what midnight looks like on the elevated highways of Tokyo. In our Initial D-fueled dreams, Nissan Skylines, and Toyota Supras go door to door on smooth and empty roads, the overhead lights strobing like the pulse of a Eurobeat track. Whether it’s the fictional hill racing of the anime genre or the very real underground top speed contests of Racing Team Mid Night, nighttime in one of the biggest metropolises in the world is the setting for Japanese car culture in the same way that Bonneville is for the American Southwest.

But before the Porsche-vs-Skyline dreams of the 1990s, the streets of Japan were ruled by American V-8s. Even the Japanese automakers themselves couldn’t resist the lure of a small-block Chevy. At the 1968 running of the Japanese Grand Prix—in a deal set up by former U.S. intelligence agent and founder of the Shadow racing team, Don Nichols—Nissan equipped its victorious R381 racing car with a 5.5-liter V-8 specially tuned by MOON speed equipment. The partnership included ex-Prince employee and “father of the Skyline” Shinichiro Sakurai flying to California to sit down with Dean Moon, the guy who helped Carroll Shelby stuff a V-8 in an AC to create the first Cobra.

By the 1970s, the Japanese economy was booming. A culture of speed wasn’t far behind. On this side of the Pacific, the Datsun 240Z and 510 had proved the Japanese could build sporting coupes and sedans capable of winning race trophies. Performance enthusiasts in Japan snapped up imported Mustangs, and Camaros, and even pickup trucks. Such cross-pollination between SoCal car culture and Yokohama street-rodding continues even today; show up on Sunday morning at Daikoku Parking Area, off the highway in Yokohama bay, and there’ll be some American iron in attendance at Japan’s informal congregation of speed.

Thanks to the research of Charles Smart, who has pored through dozens of magazines, photos, and rare videos of the period, we have some idea of the arc of the Mitsunaga Pantera. Smart runs the Auto Team Retro page on Facebook, which has many gems from the golden age of Japanese street racing.

At first, Mitsunaga embraced Japanese performance. He purchased a rotary-powered RX-3, and had it modified. While purchasing tires at a local shop, he ran into a young mechanic named Masaru Hosoki. The two men would form the most unlikely of friendships. According to numerous reports, Hosoki was an ex-bosozuku gang member, one of the motorcycle-riding delinquents who terrorized Japan’s highways at the time. Mitsunaga was a sansei, a third-generation American of Japanese ancestry, and an established company man. What would such a pair have to talk about? Going as fast as possible.

Hosoki got Mitsunaga’s RX-3 running well enough to take a few wins in local drag races. These were mostly run on the airstrips at US airbases, and there was some friendly rivalry between the servicemen and the locals. Later, Hosoki and Mitsunaga created a V-8-powered Nissan Fairlady, equipped with a 327 small-block Chevy engine. At roughly about 2400 pounds and approximately 300 hp, the pan-Pacific Frankenstein’s monster was a beast at the track. It wasn’t remotely street-legal—not with Japan’s strict shaken safety inspections—but Mitsunaga took it to the Tomei anyway.

The Tomei Expressway links Tokyo to the major port city of Nagoya, to the east. It was fully completed in 1969 and remains today one of Japan’s busiest roads. The section most popular with Japanese street racers in the late 1970s and early 1980s ran from the Ebina service area to the toll gate just before Tokyo. In the day, traffic thronged the road. Late at night, you’d only see those obsessed with speed. Mitsunaga is said to have covered the seventeen mile section in his V8-Fairlady in about six and a half minutes at an average speed of above 160 mph.

Japan had another, less illicit outlet for top-speed jousting. Also built in the 1960s, for use by the rising Japanese car industry, the Yatabe banked oval was early on used by Toyota to set several speed records with the graceful 2000GT. By the 1980s, it became the place where tuners established their bona fides, with the winners able to brag that they had the fastest car in Japan.

Mitsunaga’s Fairlady fell afoul of increasingly more rigorous regulatory inspections, so he traded it in at a used car dealership. The Fairlady wasn’t worth much, but the car he bought was a little down at heel too: an early De Tomaso Pantera, used hard and put away wet. It was originally black, but the paint was weathered and flecked with chips. The cosmetics didn’t matter. Mitsunaga and Hosoki had plans.

Argentinian-born Alejandro De Tomaso built a number of models bearing his name, but the Pantera is certainly the most famous Designed by U.S.-born Tom Tjaarda, it was made in Modena but had an American heart; namely, a 351-cubic-inch Ford “Cleveland” V-8. De Tomaso produced approximately 7000 Panteras between 1971 and 1992, and the car developed a bit of a reputation in Japan.

Mitsunaga’s De Tomaso wasn’t the only famous Pantera in Japan, by the way. TOPS, a tuner specializing in V-8 builds, fettled a number of Panteras for high-speed running through the early 1980s. It was common to swap out the Ford engine for more powerful Chevy V-8s and, with experience gained modifying Camaros or Pontiac Firebirds, tuners built some real monsters. Before the racers moved to the longer Wangan highways, which favored the endurance capabilities of the Porsche 930, packs of Panteras owned the midnight on the Tomei.

Mitsunaga took this even further with his Pantera. Instead of a small-block Chevy, it had a NASCAR-tuned 454 LS7 big-block. He reportedly paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000 for the engine alone; it had been sourced by Mario Rossi, NASCAR crew chief for the likes of Bobby Allison and Glenn “Fireball” Roberts. Rossi developed several safety innovations in his time, along with perfecting the still-used method of gluing lug nuts onto wheels to speed up pitstop times. Then he disappeared.

Indeed, no-one knows what happened to the mechanic who built this Pantera’s engine. After the huge drug smuggling scandal that rocked NASCAR in 1982, Rossi vanished from the face of the earth, never to be seen again. He supposedly died in a plane crash off the Bahamas … but the plane in question never crashed.

Rossi’s V-8 punched out over 600 hp in the back of the Mitsunaga Pantera. That would be impressive today, and by the standard of 1981 (a contemporary Countach made do with just 375 hp) it’s insane. In early November of 1981, Mitsunaga took his Pantera, newly painted red, to a Yatabe circuit high-speed shoot-out. It emerged triumphant.

Figuring Yatabe was too dangerous for civilian drivers, and wanting to take the human element of unpredictability out of things, driving duties at this event were performed by professional racers. In the case of the Mitsunaga Pantera, none other than Kunimitsu Takahashi took the wheel. Considered the father of drifting, Takahashi raced in F1, Le Mans, and gave the original hakosuka Skyline GT-R its vaunted fiftieth win.

The Pantera smashed previous records with a decisive 307 km/h (190 mph) showing, making it the then-fastest street car in Japan, and the first to crack the 300 km/h mark at Yatabe. But Mitsunaga was not fully satisfied. Nothing less than above 320 km/h (200 mph) would do. Takahashi is said to have warned him to never drive the Pantera outside of a race track setting. Mitsunaga didn’t listen.

The obsession ended in tragedy. Not long after dropping off that rattled journalist, on a night when it seems like he couldn’t quite hit his goal, Mitsunaga lost control of his Pantera. Perhaps the tires were greasy with heat from the sustained high speeds. Perhaps the engine was just too powerful and unpredictable. Whatever the case, the Pantera spun into a pole, and Garry Mitsunaga was killed instantly.

In death he became a sort of venerated ancestor to the street racing scene. Despite not being born in Japan, he was a hero to many locals, someone who never stopped chasing ever higher speeds. The Mitsunaga Pantera would go on to inspire many, and it would also become a symbol of the danger of this pursuit. A part of it, the five-sped transaxle, made it into one of the TOPS Panteras. The car itself would go on to inspire the “Devil Z” of Wangan Midnight anime fame.

What’s legend and what’s fact we are unlikely to ever know for certain. What we do know, however, is that Garry Mitsunaga and his Pantera dared to dance with the devil in the witching hour.

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The mid-1970s are known among car enthusiasts for the oil crisis and as a time when performance cars went from fire-breathing monsters to shadows of their former selves. Yet it was during this worldwide automotive turmoil that a supercar boom was born in Japan. Rooted in Circuit no Ohkami, or The Circuit Wolf, a manga serialized in the multi-million-selling Shonen Jump magazine from January 1975 to June 1979, an explosion of supercars captivated thousands of school-age kids and helped pave the way for decades of rich car culture and automotive passion in Japan.

The manga follows the adventures of Yuya Fubuki, a talented driver who races against rivals Sakon Hayase, Minoru Asuka, and others in European supercars of the era. Young readers eagerly memorized the specifications of the Lotus Europa, Ferrari Daytona, Lamborghini Countach, De Tomaso Pantera, and others as the characters faced new racing challenges with each issue.

The Circuit Wolf’s popularity made Japan supercar-crazy. It spawned spinoffs and supercar-themed media and products, including a live-action film, supercar quiz shows on television, and of course, children’s toys. Supercar erasers were a particularly ingenious creation: although shaped like the cars from the manga, they also served as pencil erasers. Emboldened children brought them to school, insisting to their teachers that the little cars were functional—not merely toys.

With little enthusiasts seemingly at every intersection, a commercially-astute car dealer came up with a plan to hold supercar shows in the parking lots of supermarkets and baseball stadiums all over Japan. A hastily-bought Ferrari 512BB became the star, and children gathered to watch it and other supercars drive by. For an extra fee, they could even ride in the passenger seat. Kids fortunate enough to live in a city that had a supercar importer (there were few) would flock to showrooms for a chance to photograph these European exotics.

Unfortunately, although perhaps unsurprisingly, all the pop culture fame driven by Japan’s youth failed to materialize into substantial sales for the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, and others. Manufacturers and importers tried to take advantage of this opportunity to sell supercars in Japan, but the boom soon disappeared, fraying distributor relations for years to come.

It could be tempting to call the supercar boom a passing fad. The toys and events may have faded quickly, but sports cars and racing were now firmly embedded in Japanese culture. The children who pored over the manga’s images in the 1970s became the teens and adults of the 1980s who would drive Japanese car culture to the next level.

Japanese marques only received secondary attention in The Circuit Wolf, and that’s not entirely surprising. Toyota’s 2000GT was short-lived, and Nissan’s Fairlady Z had only recently proven that Japan could build globally-competitive sports cars. Having seen how keen the country was for performance cars in the 1970s even if an oil crisis hindered sales, in the 1980s Japanese manufacturers unleashed a flurry of vehicles designed to meet every consumer’s sporting desires. Regardless of whether it was an entry-level AE86 Sprinter Trueno or a high-tech Skyline GT-R, those kids of the ‘70’s were first in line to buy them.

Meanwhile, from the ‘80s through the 2000s, other manga like Over Rev!, Capeta, Wangan Midnight, and the well-known Initial D carried on the pop culture tradition of The Circuit Wolf, but this time with a focus on Japanese cars as well. Now exporting the special rides, Initial D in particular would help build Japanese-market sports car mythology on American shores.

Even though by all accounts the supercar boom died out around 1979, the passion for racing ignited in many by The Circuit Wolf never truly left the hearts of Japanese car enthusiasts. It was only a few short years before Honda rejoined Formula 1 in 1983, and F1 returned to Japanese shores at Suzuka in 1987. Japanese motorsports fans now had outlets for their excitement, and over 30 years later there’s no sign they’re letting up. It’s no wonder F1 drivers rate Japan as one of their favorite stops.

Like Japanese F1 fans returning to Suzuka, those Ferraris that coursed manga pages and stadiums across Japan in the ‘70s made their presence felt a decade later. As the Japanese economy took off in the 1980s, the soft spot for European exotics created by The Circuit Wolf still lingered. Of course, the school kids from the late ‘70’s would still have been too young to afford such a car at that point—the Ferrari bubble was being fueled worldwide, especially in America and Japan, by wealthy enthusiasts and then by speculators. Once the bubble burst and prices receded in the mid-1990s, those kids who once drove their Ferrari erasers across a school desk now had a chance to buy a real one of their own. The supercar boom had come full circle.

Shinichi Ekko is a journalist, automotive historian, consultant, and founder of Maserati Club of Japan.

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Good intentions aside, sometimes innovation winds up paving a road straight to the nether regions of unprofitable, unsellable technology. That’s a shame, because great ideas aren’t necessarily ready for primetime in their initial stages. Iteration is often necessary to really perfect technology, but plenty of promising concepts never got the chance and were left to gather dust. Honda’s Electro Gyrocator of 1981 is one such example.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. Let’s backtrack for some context.

In James R. Akerman’s book, Cartographies of Travel and Navigation, we’re introduced to Japan Inc. It was 1973, and the Japanese were embarking on a seven-billion-yen project called CACS (Comprehensive Automobile Traffic Control). Fathered by Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the CACS program first started out with what we currently refer to as smart roads—road design and infrastructure based on interconnected data collection. CACS ended unsuccessfully, but it paved the way for a new foundation that arrived in 1979. Called the Association of Electronic Technology of Automobile Traffic and Driving (or JSK for short), this organization’s goal was to “popularize the CACS results and to expedite the widespread introduction of in-vehicle route guidance and information systems.”

Simply put, JSK wanted to integrate computerized navigation into cars. This, needless to say, opened the floodgates to the ubiquitous mobile technologies we see in dashboards and carry in our pockets.

By 1981, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota, were all players in this space, each vying for the technology’s mainstream acceptance in the Japanese domestic market. While all three automakers used dead reckoning to calculate vehicle position, the first (and best) implementation of the feature was Honda’s Electro Gyrocator. What made it so good was its comprehensive use of specially made, dedicated maps of Japan—something the far less complicated systems from Nissan and Toyota couldn’t touch.

Available on the flagship Accord as a dealer option in August of 1981, the Electro Gyrocator was jointly developed by Honda and Alpine Electronics (the folks who made the iconic green-button stereos of the 1980s). Its proponent Honda R&D Center Senior Managing Director Tadashi Kume, was influenced by the gun barrels of tanks, which employ gyroscopes to remain aimed at a target even when the tank itself crosses rough terrain at high speed.

As automotive journalist Murilee Martin put it, the Honda Gyrocator operated courtesy of a “bewildering system of helium-jet gyroscopes, wheel rotation sensors, and a scrolling transparent map superimposed over a CRT monitor.” Consider it a kind of Japanese Rube-Goldberg slide projector.

The system could accurately calculate distance traveled and the direction the vehicle was headed, assuming the operator slid the correct map over the Gyrocator’s screen. The main problem was cost; its $2746 asking price was higher than many of the Honda vehicles in which it could have lived. Purely digital technologies eventually won out, but the Gyrocator worked (to some extent) and it didn’t demand prohibitively expensive and complex commercial satellites to get the job done.

That same year, Nissan introduced its Drive Guide system for the 1981 Skyline, Gazelle, and Silvia. Using sensors that monitor direction and vehicle speed (i.e. a speed sensor for fuel-injected engines), the Nissan system was far less complicated than Honda’s Electro Gyrocator. There were no maps to show a precise location; the operator instead entered their latitude, longitude, and distance needed to travel. From there, a secondary display in the gauge cluster informed the driver how much farther to go, and in which direction they need to travel.

A magnetic sensor (i.e. an electronic compass) provided real-time data as to the vehicle’s direction, which lets the Drive Guide system adjust the gauge cluster’s display accordingly. While Nissan’s effort is certainly an interesting design, the lack of an actual map seemingly ensures the driver will be confused as to the best possible route.

Toyota’s Navicom system was available on the 1981 Celica, and it appears to be along the same lines as Nissan’s effort. As Toyota put it in a press release, the Celica’s Navicom system was “designed to facilitate driving in unfamiliar areas through constant display of direction and distance to destination.”

Users input their location and the distance required to travel, and Toyota’s Navicom gave them real-time information on their current direction (via ingenious compass graphic), distance remaining, and even the percentage of distance traveled. These systems are generally clueless by today’s standards, but trip computers from the likes of Lincoln and Cadillac were far less interesting and exciting to behold. Lincoln’s computer offered an Estimated Time of Arrival and more advanced fuel economy calculations, but buttons and owner’s manuals can’t top what Japan Inc.’s investment in in-car navigation created for the 1981 model year.

Satellite-based navigation systems, which would take this idea to the next level, were just around the corner. Ford was preparing a concept car with a NAVSAT-based system, but it probably saw Honda’s relative failure to launch; Ford even decided to pull the plug on a watered-down derivative to avoid getting burned. Toyota released the first CD-ROM-based navigation system in its Crown models for 1987, and it offered a modern-style GPS navigation system on the 1991 Soarer. Also in that year, General Motors piloted the TravTech navigation system in Oldsmobile Toronados rented to users in the Orlando area. The system even sported points of interest, a feature we come to expect from modern systems.

While modern technology seemingly progresses at a far faster pace now than it did in the 1980s, going from a Gyrocator and slide-in maps in 1981 to a fully-fledged GPS navigation system a decade later is nothing to sneeze at. By 1995, a system was available in Oldsmobile vehicles under the “Guidestar” name, either as a separate control panel in some models (like the Delta 88 LSS below) or as an integrated screen in the all-new Aurora. It’s good enough to merit the need for an absolutely cringe-worthy video.

Wow, that has not aged well. Apparently retailing in the 1990s wasn’t far off from the 1950s.

No matter. Decades of research in America and Japan, plus countless amounts of money spent indeed created something we can’t live without today. And just like the sales pitches (to all human beings in our diverse society), the technology behind navigation systems continues to improve as the years go by. But let’s never forget how pivotal of a role Japan Inc., and Honda in particular, played in making this dream into a reality for all of us.

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The original Honda (and for Americans, Acura) NSX was a triumph of design, engineering, and performance. The aluminum-intensive monocoque, expert tuning, and precise build quality came together in a package that not only challenged the Italian exotic competition, but proved light-years more reliable and livable than those established players. When it debuted in 1990, the mid-engine marvel dazzled the automotive world and helped cement Honda as a force to be reckoned with on the global stage. Moreover, the NSX gave Acura a critical weapon to help separate itself from Infiniti and Lexus, both newly minted premium marques arriving from the Pacific at that time.

Looking back thirty years later, it’s no surprise that a mid-engine sports car as sophisticated and groundbreaking as the NSX exploded out of Japan amid the peak of the country’s economic bubble. The real question is, why was it the only Japanese supercar of that moment? Remember: Lexus and Infiniti fully put their eggs in the luxury sedan basket with the LS and Q45, while the Toyota MR2’s target was firmly mid-market. Of all the marquee sports cars Japan’s leading lights produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Mitsubishi 3000GT, R32 Skyline, and Mazda RX-7 included) it might seem as if Honda was only automaker from the island that dared challenge Ferrari and Lamborghini head-on.

In fact, Honda did indeed inspire a few rivals chasing the same apex. Ambitious as these mid-engine performance machines were, would-be NSX-fighters from Nissan, Yamaha, and Isuzu simply couldn’t clear the obstacles—economic, engineer, and otherwise—that Honda victoriously hurdled so gracefully on its way to becoming an icon.

Nissan MID4

Nissan got into the mid-engine supercar game right around the same time as Honda, with both the NSX and the MID4 kicking off development in 1984. Nissan was much quicker out of the gate, introducing its prototype at the Frankfurt show in 1985, and the concept packed many of the technologies that would trickle down to other Nissans over the course of the next few years. Among them were the Advanced Total Traction Engineering System for All-Terrain (ATTESA) transverse-layout all-wheel drive system (later adapted to include “Electronic Torque Split” for longitudinal use with the Skyline sedans and coupes), and the four-wheel High Capacity Actively Controlled Steering (HICAS) system popularized by both the Skyline and the S13 and S15 coupes.

The original version of the MID4 was clearly intended to showcase the brand’s engineering know-how rather than challenge Europe’s supercar elite; despite its Esprit-baiting looks the coupe was wasn’t worrying anyone in Maranello with a 190-horsepower V-6.

Nissan wasn’t done with the MID4’s evolution, though. A couple of years later the creatively-named MID4-II concept car would arrive, featuring a twin-turbo version of that same motor that offered up 325 horses.

Nissan smoothed out much of the original effort’s styling for the MID4-II, giving it a swept appearance that resembles the brand’s next-generation flagship sports car, the Z32, which had yet to be introduced. The car featured numerous design cues that would more fully form in the 1990s, drawing comparisons to contemporary mid-engine Ferraris like the 308 and the 348.

Nissan would later prove it could deliver nearly every single one of its features into production—save its mid-engine platform—so what ultimately kept the MID4-II from dealer showrooms?  Two primary concerns: The first was the cost of production versus the potential to recoup investment, given that so much advanced equipment was packed into what would no doubt prove to be a low-volume vehicle riding on a bespoke platform. Then there was the question of performance. With the Skyline GT-R selling well and the redesigned Z32 nearly ready for prime time (itself offering perhaps better dynamics than the MID4-II) Nissan balked at the notion of three high-end sports cars splitting potential profits.

Yamaha OX99-11

The success of the NSX inspired more than a few automakers to reach above their station, and the early ’90s quickly delivered a strong crop of one-off or ultra-low production supercars that mimicked its formula. Surprisingly, one of the companies to throw its hat into the mid-engine ring was Yamaha, which had almost zero experience producing road cars.

What Yamaha could count on was its incredible engine acumen. The brand had a proven track record of regularly partnering with bigger brands to tune or design performance powerplants. After producing a flurry of Formula 1 drivetrains that experienced varying degrees of success on the starting grid, Yamaha opted to recoup some of its costs by farming out the design of a sports car that could be built around one of its high-strung race motors.

The design brief was simple: find a way to package the company’s 3.5-liter F1 V-12 (the OX99) and cut weight by using as much carbon fiber as possible in the process. A pair of concepts were proffered by both German and British companies, and the latter (International Automotive Design) emerged as the more striking of the two. The shape of the vehicle was outrageous, featuring a wild aero-bar across the front end that connected the vehicle’s fenders together and a single-seat center cockpit (later adapted to a tandem seat setup) that was like nothing else on the road.

It was a fittingly dramatic move for Yamaha, which wanted to shock the world in every way possible with its very first supercar. Unfortunately, IAD began to bicker with the Japanese brain trust concerning just how much it would cost to produce such a wild design using the available motor and materials. Frustrated, Yamaha pulled the project away and threw it in the laps of Ypsilon Technology, a wholly-owned company also based in the U.K.

Swapping firms didn’t change anything about the financial realities associated with the OX99-11 project. Nor did it remotely change the realities of Japan’s flagging bubble economy that was about to burst. Yamaha built three prototypes in 1992, each featuring a 400-horsepower, 10,000-rpm-redline V-12, but nothing ever reached production. Facing down a rumored $800,000 per-unit minimum to simply break even and a $1M price tag, the final 1992 burst of the Japanese asset price bubble ensured Yamaha never met its 1994 on-sale date.

Isuzu 4200R

Right around the time Nissan was preparing the MID4-II, Isuzu began exploring an upmarket push. Although it was known primarily for exporting commercial vehicles and building everyone’s favorite SUV rebadge candidates, the company had hit on some success with the sporty Piazza/Impulse hatchback and its tuning partnership with Lotus.

Given that corporate relations between the two companies were facilitated via their mutual corporate parent, General Motors, it only made sense for Isuzu to deepen the bond when it came to building its first GT supercar. To this end, Isuzu tapped a Lotus-based 4.2-liter V-8 engine (which featured dual overhead cams and four valves per cylinder) as well as a suspension setup from the British brand, combining it in an unusual four-passenger coupe called the 4200R. Ultra-aero, ultra-cool.

Displayed at the 1989 Tokyo Motor Show, the vehicle looked as though it had been ripped straight from an arcade game. The 4200R’s elongated body (necessary for the larger cabin space Isuzu wanted) gave it unique proportions compared to most mid-engine coupes of its era. On top of that, it was stocked full of advanced gear like satellite navigation and a then-state-of-the-art fax machine, indicating that Isuzu was courting the luxury set rather than the pure sports car crowd. (Gordon Murray might have included three seats in the McLaren F1, but a fax was very much not in the brief.)

Of all the vehicles on this list, the 4200R was the only one to fall victim to the vagaries of corporate strategy. In 1992, Isuzu elected to stop building passenger cars entirely, shifting its attention to fully trucks and SUVs, and in doing so obliterating any hope of the super-GT finding its way to market even as a limited-production halo model. Decades later, 4200R designer Shiro Nakamura (who would go on to pen the Nissan 350Z as well as the Juke) would work together with Kazunori Yamauchi to create a digital version of the Isuzu that never was for the Gran Turismo video game series.

The post Where the NSX succeeded, these 3 mid-engine Japanese moonshots failed appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Possibly the largest single-year valuation increase we will ever see for a classic car is for a … Subaru 360?

In the matter of just a year, the Subaru 360 has quadrupled in value. In January 2020, the value for an Excellent (#2) condition 1969 Subaru 360 Sedan was $10,100. Now, just a year later, that same microcar is worth $44,300. One look at the historical pricing on Hagerty Valuation Tools shows how dramatic of an increase we are witnessing.

A little over a year ago, in November 2019, a yellow 1970 Subaru 360 Deluxe in great condition sold on Bring a Trailer for a modest $8500, right between our #2 (Excellent) and #3 (Good) condition values at the time. Then, less than a year later, in October 2020, a 1969 Subaru 360 Deluxe in marginally better condition sold for $50,000 on the same platform. This second sale wasn’t an outlier, either: two other Subaru 360s sold for over $30,000 that same month at RM’s Elkhart auction.

Certain cars are famous for mobilizing the masses, and they are often especially beloved in their home countries. Germany has the Volkswagen Beetle, France the Citroen 2CV, Italy the Fiat 500, and in the United States, we have the Ford Model T. For Japan, it’s the Subaru 360—affectionately nicknamed the “Ladybug.”

The 360 was Subaru’s first production car and Japan’s first mass-produced Kei car—a class formed specifically to provide inexpensive city cars for the working class. In 1955, Kei car engine displacement was capped at 360 cubic-centimeters, and just three years later Subaru dominated the class, selling nearly 400,000 examples between 1958 and 1971. Weight was kept low by means of a thin steel monocoque chassis and fiberglass roof, which helped make up for the meager 16 horsepower from the 360’s rear-mounted, 356cc two-stroke vertical-twin engine. The Subie also featured a four-corner independent torsion bar suspension, with finned brake drums bolted directly to the 10-inch steel wheels. Although it looks very basic, the 360 was fairly advanced for its time.

The 360 was a versatile platform offered in a variety of body styles, all conforming to Japanese Kei car regulations. The most popular of these variants was the two-door hardtop sedan (roll-back convertible top was optional), followed by a five-door “Sambar” van. For light utility purposes, a ramp-side truck was offered starting in 1961. Briefly, in Japan, Subaru offered a station wagon called the “Custom.”

For a hipper audience, Subaru made the “Young S,” which featured a slightly upgraded 25-horsepower engine, an extra transmission gear, bucket seats, tachometer, and a dented roof for a surfboard. An even “faster” version never offered in North America called the “Young SS” had all the modifications of the Young S with a dual-carb version of the 360 engine producing an impressive 36 horsepower. That’s 100 horsepower per liter! Watch out, Honda S2000!

The little Subie was underappreciated from the moment it arrived on American soil.

In 1968, Malcom Bricklin (of Yugo and SV-1 fame) and Harvey Lamm founded Subaru of America and imported 10,000 Subaru 360s to fill dealerships. The U.S.-market 360 was an improved version of the original sold a decade earlier in Japan. Engine output was increased to 25 horsepower and an overdrive fourth gear was added to the manual transmission, as with the Young S. An optional “Autoclutch” system eliminated the clutch pedal and operated the clutch automatically with an electromagnet. Gone were the days of pre-mixing oil using the fuel cap as a measuring cup, the new “Subarumatic” lubrication system mixed oil automatically from a reservoir in the engine compartment.  Like the Model T, you could have any color you’d like—as long as it was white with a red interior. The Subaru 360 was advertised as “Cheap and Ugly,” with the $1297 price ($9850 in 2020 dollars) and 66 mpg as the main selling points. American’s didn’t care about fuel economy just yet, and the Ladybug flopped. Subaru’s roaring success these days all happened after a seriously rocky start.

In a period review, Consumer Reports saw the need for a small economy car in America but ultimately branded the 360 as “not acceptable” for American roads because of its poor safety standards and blatant lack of power. The publication claimed the car could not hit 60 mph on its test track, and it managed to clock a 37.5 second 0-50 mph time. For context, a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle could make the 0-50 sprint in 14.5 seconds. To give you muscle car fans a laugh, the CR testing crew managed to run the quarter mile in 28.5 seconds at 47 mph. You wouldn’t want to go much faster, anyway; the rear-hinged doors were known to fly open in high winds.

The brake system was the only thing worthy of praise, though the suspension setup caused the car to dive tremendously under light braking. “Just driving straight down an open road could be unsettling,” CR concluded.

On top of that, the 360 wasn’t as care-free as it appeared. According to the user manual, the break-in period suggests the driver never exceed 45 mph for the first 1200 miles and, although two-stroke motor oil was rarely available at gas stations, only one brand should be used for the life of the vehicle. In normal American driving conditions, the Subie only managed 25 to 35 mpg—nearly half what was advertised.  The discrepancy is likely due to the car being designed for a Japanese city where speed limits rarely exceed 25 mph and average commutes are less than 10 miles.

More than anything, collision safety was a concern. Imagine a crash between this little Subaru and any 1970s American car. The driver of a Cadillac Coupe DeVille wouldn’t even notice. How did the 360 make it past American vehicle requirements in the first place? Due to a loophole, the sub-1000-pound curb weight made the 360 exempt from federalized safety standards. Bricklin, though, installed seatbelts to give some sense of safety. After its review, Consumer Reports suggested the National Highway Safety Bureau should remove the 1000-pound exemption from its safety standards.

Ultimately, a Volkswagen Beetle was only $400 more and superior in most respects. The American public agreed, and dealers were stuck with unsold 360s for years. Some even offered “buy one, get one free” deals to clear inventory. It’s rumored that unsold Subarus were loaded on a barge and pushed overboard to create an artificial reef off the California coast, but that probably didn’t happen. More than a few likely ended up being converted to go-karts at the hands of Bruce Meyers (of Meyers Manx fame) to be used at “FasTrack”, Bricklin’s next venture.

So, why the sudden Subie fever?

Modern Japanese classics are becoming a lot more valuable as of late, and in an age of nostalgia, collectors will look for deals in a marque’s earlier work. The 360 founded Subaru and is the company’s only car that many would consider “classic” (most legendary Subarus were made post-1980), so it likely strikes a chord with Subaru enthusiasts—a group that grows larger every year. The same thing is happening to early Hondas. The S600/S800 of the 1960s was Honda’s first production car sold in America, and it recently made the 2021 Hagerty Bull Market List.

Thanks to the passage of time, the flaws that made the Subaru a failure as a new car can now be appreciated as the early missteps of a nascent brand. When you look at other oddball microcars of the era, its amazing the Subaru 360 was ever priced under $10,000. An Excellent (#2) condition 1960 BMW Isetta 300 is $36,200. A 1964 Messerschmitt KR200 in similar condition is $53,600. Even at its current value of $44,300, the Subaru 360 seems like a steal compared to a 1963 Fiat 500 Jolly at $64,700.

Like the Jolly, maybe the yacht crowd is buying them up. The Subaru commercial below hints at that fact … maybe.

As a historically important vehicle, all of this attention tells us that the 360 is finally getting the warm welcome it hoped for, albeit 50 years too late.

Like this article? Check out Hagerty Insider, our website devoted to tracking trends in the collector vehicle market.

The post Once “Cheap and Ugly,” the Subaru 360 is having an unexpected moment appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Japan is set to follow the U.K. and California by banning sales of internal combustion engine-only cars by the mid 2030s.

According to a report by Nikkei Asia, the country’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is currently weighing up plans to stop the sale of new diesel and gas-powered cars by 2035 as a key part of its plan to become a zero-emissions society by 2050.

The move would allow the continued sale of hybrid vehicles, such as those pioneered by Toyota and Honda. Toyota says that every model in its range will have an electrified option by 2025, while Nissan aims to increase the number of hybrid and electric cars its sells from 30 percent to 60 percent in less than three years.

Japan’s plans are not as harsh as Britain’s where the government has insisted that sales of pure ICE cars must stop in 2030 and hybrids to be axed in 2035, making every new car sold pure electric. California has also picked 2035 as its EV-only mandate timing, with New Jersey aiming to follow, and China is targeting the same year for half of all new cars sold to be electric, with the remainder hybrids. France has opted for a 2040 ban.

The tide is turning against the internal combustion engine, but there is hope that enthusiasts will be able to remain on the road, either by electrifying their classic cars or running them on synthetic fuel.

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