(Source: mydirectionlesslife)
REVENGE OF THE ECONOBOX: EARLY JAPANESE IMPORTS FIND ADMIRERS 
By RICHARD S. CHANG
NY Times Published: February 3, 2012
WHEN Japanese cars and trucks began arriving in the United States in earnest during the 1970s, they were widely seen as disposable.
Reliable, maybe. Future classics? Not likely.
But in the past decade, those bargain-price models from the ’70s and ’80s have been revisited by a generation of enthusiasts who grew up riding in the back seats.
“For many like myself, it’s nostalgic,” said Jun Imai, a 36-year-old designer at the Hot Wheels division of Mattel, where he directed the styling for die-cast models of two 1970s-vintage Nissans released last year.
“It’s a very special feeling I have for cars like these — the designs, the sound of the engines, the way they drive,” Mr. Imai said. “They are so distinctive, yet most are approachable in terms of costs and availability.”
Mr. Imai, who lives in Southern California, owns a 1971 Datsun 510 wagon and a 1972 Datsun pickup. The vehicles’ peculiar silhouettes, diminutive scale and heavy use of chrome trim are typical of Japanese styling of the period.
Yorgo Tloupas, a co-founder and creative director of Intersection magazine, which is based in Paris, is the owner of a 1981 Honda Prelude. “I love that they don’t look like anything else,” Mr. Tloupas said.
“The first time I saw the Honda 600, I had to have the car,” he said, referring to the tiny 2-cylinder sedan that was among the company’s first models shipped to the United States.
The trend has grown rapidly. In 2005, Terry Yamaguchi, 39, and her husband, Koji, 41, who own a 1972 Toyota Celica coupe and a 1977 Celica liftback, started a casual meet-up in Long Beach, Calif., for like-minded enthusiasts. More than 200 cars showed up; the next year they created an official event, the Japanese Classic Car Show, now in its seventh year and attracting some 350 entries.
“We were not going to continue,” Ms. Yamaguchi said. “It cost a lot and we didn’t have any sponsors. We only did it for ourselves. But people were excited.”
The Japanese have a term for their suddenly trendy vintage cars. They are called nostalgic cars, said Benjamin Hsu, a co-founder of Japanese Nostalgic Car, a Web site and magazine based in Diamond Bar, Calif. “You know how the Japanese like to appropriate English terms but use them in a slightly different way,” Mr. Hsu said.
Yet the name is fitting. The demographic that’s seemingly responsible for the popularity of Japanese nostalgic cars is 30-something men who grew up with the cars. Mr. Imai remembers his uncles working on and racing Datsun 510s and 240Zs when he was a boy.
“When you have cars that were everyday cars, there’s an emotional connection,” said Bryan Thompson, a designer for Nissan, both in the Japan and the United States, from 2001 to 2009. “They’re a part of your life in the way a pet is a part of your life, or a family member.”
Mr. Thompson, who is now a contract designer for Volvo, cited his parents’ 1983 Toyota Tercel wagon as the inspiration behind his career choice.
For Mr. Hsu, interest in the era’s cars was stimulated during a layover at the Narita airport near Tokyo on a trip to Taiwan. “I stepped out for one second and saw the coolest cars I had ever seen,” he said. “They were cars that I never knew existed. That kind of blew my mind.”
Mr. Hsu founded the Japanese Nostalgic Car Web site with his brother, Dan, in 2006. They began publishing the magazine, a quarterly, two years later.
Mr. Hsu said that the nostalgic car trend in the United States was partly an evolution of the Japanese import-tuning craze of the 1990s that spawned the “Fast and the Furious” film franchise. A further push came around 2000, as interest rose in performance cars made for Japan’s home market (a movement in its own right, known as Japanese Domestic Market, or J.D.M.).
“People really wanted to find out what Japanese people were doing,” Mr. Hsu said. “And what Japanese people were doing was drifting.”
Drifting, a professional motor sport in Japan since 2000, came from the same hooligan spirit as drag racing. But instead of speeding in a straight line, drivers slide their cars around curves, smoke pouring off the tires. It required a specific kind of car — lightweight, and more important, rear-drive.
“Japanese companies weren’t building rear-wheel-drive cars, unless you get to high-end luxury,” Mr. Hsu said, which meant using models like the Toyota Corolla GT-S and theNissan 240SX from the 1980s.
Mr. Hsu owns a 1986 Toyota Corolla GT-S. “It had all the performance goodies — twin-cam, 16 valves, rear-wheel drive with an optional limited-slip differential,” he said. “To me that is the ideal performance package. The car is lightweight. It handles brilliantly. The motor revs to 7,500 r.p.m.”
The Corolla GT-S “was the gateway drug” to other nostalgic cars, Mr. Hsu said. He also cited other popular examples: the first-generation Toyota Celica; the Honda N600 and Civic CVCC; and several Mazdas — RX-2, RX-3 and the first-generation RX-7.
Many nostalgia-car enthusiasts modify the engines and suspensions, and install parts made for Japan-market models. But the appeal of vintage Japanese cars isn’t based solely on performance.
Mr. Tloupas, whose magazine collaborated with Honda last year in customizing a CR-Z, said he had always been captivated by Japanese design. “They were kind of quirky, he said.
Mr. Thompson explained that Japanese designers were still trying to find their aesthetic and, much as Chinese automakers are doing today, they imitated existing forms.
“Look at a lot of the early to mid-1970s Japanese economy cars,” he said. “They were oftentimes reinterpretations of American cars from the 1960s. Because they didn’t have the same proportions, they were very strange.”
Of course, Japanese automakers didn’t always get designs wrong. The Datsun 240Z was popular from its release as a 1970 model. The Datsun 510 has served as a platform for road racers for decades. And Japanese pickups are noted for their durability; it’s not unusual to find one with 300,000 miles on the odometer.
This year, Hot Wheels released two 1:43 scale diecast models of vintage Japanese cars, the 1971 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-X and 1973 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R. In Japan, they are equivalent to the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air or Corvette, but neither car was sold new in the United States.
The Skylines are very rare, even in Japan, and very expensive. Of the 1971 Skyline, Mr. Imai, said, “From a cultural standpoint, you’ll notice more recently this car appearing in movies and video games.”
Another model, the Toyota 2000GT, is widely regarded as the original Japanese supercar. It was sold only in limited numbers in the United States and is valued at more than $400,000 in collector-car guides; a 2000GT racecar is currently being offered for $1.7 million.
But most vintage Japanese cars remain very affordable. On eBay, a 1976 Honda Civic CVCC 5-speed with 59,000 miles recently sold for $3,550. A 1977 Corolla SR5 with 55,000 miles sold for $4,000.
Those prices may sound high for 35-year-old Japanese compacts — the prices are roughly what the cars sold for when new — but they are low compared with, say, a vintage Alfa Romeo or Chevrolet Camaro. And now owners, aware of the rising interest, are increasingly choosing to hold onto their cars.
“There are people out there,” Mr. Hsu said. “They’ve got extremely low-mileage cars, completely original, stowed in their garages all over the place.”
mydirectionlesslife: Yo dog
1980 Bruce Weber photo for Vogue from the January 2012 issue of British Vogue. (via)
For Andy Warhol, the actual painting of the car became a performance piece, done by his own hand live before cameras as a publicity event. Warhol approached the car with a carefree spirit and an uncharacteristic interest in a sort of “action painting.” The car, a BMW M1, is covered with multicolored areas of paint that suggest movement (blurred particularly at racing speeds), but also perhaps individual side panels taken from different cars. This greatly oscures the overall form of the car. With the handle edge of the brush, Warhol scraped lines into the painted surfaces, implying wind moving over the surface but also further de-materializing the surface of this fine racing car. “I adore the car,” Warhol said after he’d finished. “It’s much better than a work of art.” Certainly from a formal perspective much differs from Warhol’s paintings, which were often achieved with the use of stencils or silkscreens with a prescribed order. - Christopher Mount, Design Historian and Curator (From the LACMA catalogue BMW ART CARS February 12-24, 2009)
![People buy cars for a lot of different reasons. Some guys want to show how rich they are; some guys want to show how sexy they are and how fast they drive - people want to show they’ve arrived. The cars that I bought are not cars that look like you’ve arrived. They look like cars that you love and want to drive. They are not about a guy who says, “I want to have a lot of cars.” It’s not about that: it’s about loving them and not wanting to sell ‘em!
Like all kids, I grew up loving cars. And growing up in New York I was surrounded by cars. My family had a 1949 Pontiac - navy blue, torpedo back - but I am the youngest of four children and it was always being taken by my brothers, so I never had all those great opportunities to have a car to go out on a date. I liked American cars like Cadillacs, but I didn’t want to buy a Cadillac. First of all, I couldn’t afford one, but my eye was more on Rolls-Royces, Jaguars and, later, MGs and Austin Healeys - these were what I was interested in, they had a lot of style. At the time, those cars were very rare in America, you’d see them in the movies occasionally, but there was a company called Inskip Motors that would carry a couple, and as a kid I’d look in the window and think, “Oh my God, would I love that car!” They represented a different world for me.
The first car I bought was a 1961 Morgan, with a wooden frame and a strap across the hood - it was cream, or off-white, and cost $1,500. I think it was four or five years old. I was a single man with no family, and that car was a big thing for me. I sold ties, and would put them in the back of the Morgan and drive out to shops on the outskirts of New York. I came across as a very different kind of tie salesman - they normally wore a black hat and a black coat, and I’d arrive in a tweed jacket with suede patches, carrying my ties out of my Morgan.
So you could say I loved England and English cars. But a big part of my philosophy as a designer has always been that things look better with age, and English cars had that: the racing-green imagery, the wooden dashboard, a car you would keep forever and would have no age. The Morgan or MG had that spirit, with the wheel on the back, the wooden dashboard, wooden steering wheel and wire wheels - those were the cars that represented England for me. But it was also their compactness, the driving, speeding and shifting. I grew up when they’d stopped making stick shifts in America, but English sports cars had a stick shift, which made them an adventure and fun to drive.
For five or six years after I married, I had to knuckle down and work, so didn’t pay much attention to the car I drove, so long as it had a baby seat. But I yearned to get a Morgan again, so when my kids got a little older, I got the Morgan back. This time it was a four-seater, British racing green.
The first new car I ever bought was a 1971 Mercedes convertible, the last of its type ever made, though I didn’t know that at the time. I bought it on Park Avenue at 57th Street. I walked in and said, “I want to have that car.” And that was an amazing feeling. The salesman said, “We usually sell this car with black seats and black top.” But I asked for tan seats and top. So it’s probably one of the only ones like that. Although I’ve added to my car collection, it is still my family car. And I still have the Morgan. And they’re still beautiful.
The reason I accumulated these cars was because I loved the ones I had and I didn’t want to sell them. So I kept adding to them. I was always thinking, “If something happens, I can at least get my money back, because they didn’t depreciate.” When I first started coming to England, I used to go to Coys of London and look at Jaguars, Ferraris and Morgans. I once bought a very rare Bentley convertible, and the owner said, “Ralph, some day you’re going to want a race car.” And I said, “Oh no!” Sure enough, a year later, I went back to Coys and saw a Bentley “Blower”. It was winter and this guy drove in with a big shearling air-force jacket on and the top down, and it was exciting. I got hooked and bought one of the great cars of all time. I was in love with the history.
I first reacted to English cars as part of my love of English things. But as I developed as a man, seeing the world, I started to get myself an education. For instance, I had a friend who drove a Porsche Turbo Carrera. It was a complete departure from English cars; it was very industrial and mechanised, and also small and very simple. And I got into that concept: I learned from cars and connected with their “moods” - they reflected where I was going with my sensibilities as a designer. So the Porsche was “industrial” and it was an intelligent car, the Morgan was the Englishman’s rustic car, the Ferrari was more flamboyant, etc.
I had always thought Ferraris were too flashy for me, but then I drove my neighbour’s in East Hampton [Rolling Stone founder/publisher Jann Wenner] and loved the sound of it. We took a ride in each other’s cars one day - he had a Ferrari and he liked my Porsche. And later, in London, I came out of the Connaught hotel one day and saw a beautiful black Ferrari convertible. I went to a dealer to ask about it and was told there were only 125 of them and they were very hard to get hold of. That started the hunt for Ferraris.
When I came along, they were already getting valuable, but not as valuable as they became. I bought these cars not thinking I was going to have the best collection in the world, but because when you get one it’s a disease. Especially Ferraris. I’m a big Porsche lover, but they are a different sensibility, the Ferraris are more art pieces, they are more sensuous. I loved the authenticity of having all the right details and getting the original car back together. They never thought of them as “valuable cars”. They’d throw the engine and put another one in to finish a race; they didn’t care what was the right engine for the car; they just wanted to finish.
So as I started to understand Ferraris and their history, I started to get hooked. I realised how the cars developed and how the technology and the racing history changed them, particularly those of the late Fifties and early Sixties. I loved those cars because they had great shapes and details, and I loved the sexiness of a race car. And because the fantasy is to drive one really well, I went to racing school in California. I thought I was going to be the new Paul Newman, until I realised it takes a lot of time to be a good driver. You can’t be a weekend driver and think you’re good; you’ve really got to race. I’ve been on tracks, but never felt confident enough to be the good driver I wanted to be. It’s always a regret. Every spring, I have that, “Aw God, why did I let that go?” But I love driving at weekends, I drive in the country with my son and we race around.
Cars, like fashion, are a reflection of the times. What I like about cars today is they’re looking to the future. I think the technology is really exciting; in the Porsches and Ferraris, it keeps getting better.
But I have to like the new cars. I’ve been thinking about it, but I’m not sure I’d buy the new McLaren. It’s a nice car, but I’m not sure it has the same message to me as the F1. I fell in love with that car, it was a passion to me. Everything about that car has a revolutionary sensibility that is amazing - the way it feels on the road - like I’m in a jet plane. I drive it out in Colorado where the roads are clear and open, I’ll take along some friends and it’s just incredible.
I’ve always taken everything about the things I own very seriously, and these cars are treasures; they have racing histories. People say, “Wouldn’t you rather not have restored them?” But I want to use them. These cars are driven all the time. And if I was a car, I’d like to be taken care of the way I take care of my cars.
Originally published in the August 2011 issue of British GQ.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly27xsYXLa1qzu6nxo1_500.jpg)
People buy cars for a lot of different reasons. Some guys want to show how rich they are; some guys want to show how sexy they are and how fast they drive - people want to show they’ve arrived. The cars that I bought are not cars that look like you’ve arrived. They look like cars that you love and want to drive. They are not about a guy who says, “I want to have a lot of cars.” It’s not about that: it’s about loving them and not wanting to sell ‘em!
Like all kids, I grew up loving cars. And growing up in New York I was surrounded by cars. My family had a 1949 Pontiac - navy blue, torpedo back - but I am the youngest of four children and it was always being taken by my brothers, so I never had all those great opportunities to have a car to go out on a date. I liked American cars like Cadillacs, but I didn’t want to buy a Cadillac. First of all, I couldn’t afford one, but my eye was more on Rolls-Royces, Jaguars and, later, MGs and Austin Healeys - these were what I was interested in, they had a lot of style. At the time, those cars were very rare in America, you’d see them in the movies occasionally, but there was a company called Inskip Motors that would carry a couple, and as a kid I’d look in the window and think, “Oh my God, would I love that car!” They represented a different world for me.
The first car I bought was a 1961 Morgan, with a wooden frame and a strap across the hood - it was cream, or off-white, and cost $1,500. I think it was four or five years old. I was a single man with no family, and that car was a big thing for me. I sold ties, and would put them in the back of the Morgan and drive out to shops on the outskirts of New York. I came across as a very different kind of tie salesman - they normally wore a black hat and a black coat, and I’d arrive in a tweed jacket with suede patches, carrying my ties out of my Morgan.
So you could say I loved England and English cars. But a big part of my philosophy as a designer has always been that things look better with age, and English cars had that: the racing-green imagery, the wooden dashboard, a car you would keep forever and would have no age. The Morgan or MG had that spirit, with the wheel on the back, the wooden dashboard, wooden steering wheel and wire wheels - those were the cars that represented England for me. But it was also their compactness, the driving, speeding and shifting. I grew up when they’d stopped making stick shifts in America, but English sports cars had a stick shift, which made them an adventure and fun to drive.
For five or six years after I married, I had to knuckle down and work, so didn’t pay much attention to the car I drove, so long as it had a baby seat. But I yearned to get a Morgan again, so when my kids got a little older, I got the Morgan back. This time it was a four-seater, British racing green.
The first new car I ever bought was a 1971 Mercedes convertible, the last of its type ever made, though I didn’t know that at the time. I bought it on Park Avenue at 57th Street. I walked in and said, “I want to have that car.” And that was an amazing feeling. The salesman said, “We usually sell this car with black seats and black top.” But I asked for tan seats and top. So it’s probably one of the only ones like that. Although I’ve added to my car collection, it is still my family car. And I still have the Morgan. And they’re still beautiful.
The reason I accumulated these cars was because I loved the ones I had and I didn’t want to sell them. So I kept adding to them. I was always thinking, “If something happens, I can at least get my money back, because they didn’t depreciate.” When I first started coming to England, I used to go to Coys of London and look at Jaguars, Ferraris and Morgans. I once bought a very rare Bentley convertible, and the owner said, “Ralph, some day you’re going to want a race car.” And I said, “Oh no!” Sure enough, a year later, I went back to Coys and saw a Bentley “Blower”. It was winter and this guy drove in with a big shearling air-force jacket on and the top down, and it was exciting. I got hooked and bought one of the great cars of all time. I was in love with the history.
I first reacted to English cars as part of my love of English things. But as I developed as a man, seeing the world, I started to get myself an education. For instance, I had a friend who drove a Porsche Turbo Carrera. It was a complete departure from English cars; it was very industrial and mechanised, and also small and very simple. And I got into that concept: I learned from cars and connected with their “moods” - they reflected where I was going with my sensibilities as a designer. So the Porsche was “industrial” and it was an intelligent car, the Morgan was the Englishman’s rustic car, the Ferrari was more flamboyant, etc.
I had always thought Ferraris were too flashy for me, but then I drove my neighbour’s in East Hampton [Rolling Stone founder/publisher Jann Wenner] and loved the sound of it. We took a ride in each other’s cars one day - he had a Ferrari and he liked my Porsche. And later, in London, I came out of the Connaught hotel one day and saw a beautiful black Ferrari convertible. I went to a dealer to ask about it and was told there were only 125 of them and they were very hard to get hold of. That started the hunt for Ferraris.
When I came along, they were already getting valuable, but not as valuable as they became. I bought these cars not thinking I was going to have the best collection in the world, but because when you get one it’s a disease. Especially Ferraris. I’m a big Porsche lover, but they are a different sensibility, the Ferraris are more art pieces, they are more sensuous. I loved the authenticity of having all the right details and getting the original car back together. They never thought of them as “valuable cars”. They’d throw the engine and put another one in to finish a race; they didn’t care what was the right engine for the car; they just wanted to finish.
So as I started to understand Ferraris and their history, I started to get hooked. I realised how the cars developed and how the technology and the racing history changed them, particularly those of the late Fifties and early Sixties. I loved those cars because they had great shapes and details, and I loved the sexiness of a race car. And because the fantasy is to drive one really well, I went to racing school in California. I thought I was going to be the new Paul Newman, until I realised it takes a lot of time to be a good driver. You can’t be a weekend driver and think you’re good; you’ve really got to race. I’ve been on tracks, but never felt confident enough to be the good driver I wanted to be. It’s always a regret. Every spring, I have that, “Aw God, why did I let that go?” But I love driving at weekends, I drive in the country with my son and we race around.
Cars, like fashion, are a reflection of the times. What I like about cars today is they’re looking to the future. I think the technology is really exciting; in the Porsches and Ferraris, it keeps getting better.
But I have to like the new cars. I’ve been thinking about it, but I’m not sure I’d buy the new McLaren. It’s a nice car, but I’m not sure it has the same message to me as the F1. I fell in love with that car, it was a passion to me. Everything about that car has a revolutionary sensibility that is amazing - the way it feels on the road - like I’m in a jet plane. I drive it out in Colorado where the roads are clear and open, I’ll take along some friends and it’s just incredible.
I’ve always taken everything about the things I own very seriously, and these cars are treasures; they have racing histories. People say, “Wouldn’t you rather not have restored them?” But I want to use them. These cars are driven all the time. And if I was a car, I’d like to be taken care of the way I take care of my cars.
Originally published in the August 2011 issue of British GQ.
Living and working in the Mission is interesting. Today I saw a woman peeing in public and 5 minutes later I see a guy climb out of a cherry 356C.
Saab 900 Turbo
When race car driver and auctioneer Herve Poulain asked his friend, artist Alexander Calder, to paint the BMW 3.0 CLS that he would race in the 1975 Le Mans endurance race, it was the beginning of a truly gorgeous concept. Calder’s design of the BMW 3.0 CSL was the first Art Car ever, and one of his last works of art before he died in 1976. His rendition of the BMW Art Car boasts powerful colors and attractive curving expanses, which he applied generously to the wings, hood and roof. Video here.
