Which Classic Do You Wish You Could Buy New OEM Parts For?
If you’re the kind of person who thinks of Godzilla less as a monstrous manifestation of scientific folly and more of a JDM touring car hero, you may have read yesterday about Nissan’s Nismo Heritage announcement. The gist of that is this: together with a network of tuners and suppliers, the program will begin in earnest on December 1st by offering a selection of new parts for the R32 generation of the Skyline GT-R. They won’t sell you every component necessary to build one like a massive Tamiya model kit in your garage, but they are offering a healthy catalog that includes a little bit of everything, from badges to bushings, wiring harnesses to wings.
Classic support from manufacturers is nothing new though—if nothing else, it’s a great way for OEMs to show support for the enthusiast niche while making some wild profit margins on trim clips for the second time around— but I think it has started to shift a bit as more and more cars begin to fall under the moniker of “modern classic.”
BMW will soon shift the E39 5-Series parts service under their BMW Classic department for instance, and though the R32 Skyline isn’t quite as new a car as that, it’s still clearly a product of a different era than the first Skylines to wear the GT-R badge in the ‘70s. It’s hard to say exactly where the divide occurs in terms of years, but it’s not hard to recognize which cars fall on either side.
It makes sense for manufacturers to expand their classic services to include more model years as time goes on, and we hope the trend continues, but in the meantime, we want to hear from you: which car do you wish would receive OEM support again?
Photography by Jayson Fong, Ted Gushue, Federico Bajetti, Jeremy Heslup, Andrew Golseth, and Courtney Cutchen
