Remembering Japanese cars from the past
Found this video on Youtube and it features, according to the info posted by the author, a Carina GT-R AA63 tuned by V-Factory. I tried to find info about V-Factory but I did not success so far… I did find this site, but it only mentions V-Factory to be in the Hyogo Prefecture.
This is the video featuring the AA63:
Anyone familiar with V-Factory or knows what their website is?
Well it’s the big news of today anyway and I already put it on the AEU86 twitter, so why not place it here again:
Toyota and Subaru have announced that, due to the financial crisis, they postponed their joint development of a small FR coupe (also known as the successor of the Toyota Corolla AE86) till at least 2012 while the originial plan was they would start with building late 2011.
Reason for this can be sought in the shrinking market for cars in Japan. The market has been shrinking for years now due to reliability of cars, but it became worse because of the financial crisis.
My gut feeling is that it will probably be postponed till 2013, but of course this does not mean it will never meet the market at all. At least it should temper the expectations of the car since it was over-hyped anyway.
This is how the car probably would look like:
Artist impression of what the small FR coupe should look like
Original source:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aCU1OZuheIys&refer=japan
I found the news already copied here (in order of time):
http://japanesenostalgiccar.com/blog/2008/12/22/rwd-toyobaru-on-hold-nsx-dead/
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/22/report-toyobaru-delayed-until-2012-or-later/
http://speedhunters.com/archive/2008/12/23/news-gt-gt-toyota-subaru-fr-project-delayed-until-2012.aspx
Just got an email from Shaner who runs Club4AC for over 2 years now. Club4AC is dead, long live www.ToyotaPowered.com!
Well, changing your domainname isn’t that bad if it is an improvement above the old name. I understand why he did it: he will always be blamed his site’s success is drifting along the success of the bigger brother Club4AG and it is limiting to the cars with a 4AC engine only, just like AEU86 is limiting to the AE86 only.
Currently he actually implemented a redirection of the old content to the new domain with a 301 HTTP header (Moved Permanently). This is indeed the correct way to do, however on the new domain we get redirected to IP.board instead of the good old phpbb (behind /old/ ). Of course we get an IP.board error: “Sorry, the link that brought you to this page seems to be out of date or broken.” which will cause Google (and other search engines) to end up on the same page for every already indexed page. They will mark the content duplicate and remove the old pages from the index.
Also the second page I requested ended up in a site overlay which caused me to click away from the site: IMO people doing site overlays should not deserve traffic!
The CoConut Boys (C-C-B) are a quite well known band in Japan. They made a few hitsongs during the 80s. Lately they featured a song on the soundtrack of Densha Otoko and since I was looking for a different song on that soundtrack I came across C-C-B’s Romantic Ga Tomaranai (1985):
Wow! 80s sunglasses, 80s synthesizers, electronic drum kit, gelly hair and synchronous ballet dancing! Talk about 80s here!!
IMHO synchronous ballet dancing in videoclips is the worst thing ever happened to popular music! But it surely gives you that 80s feeling. Anyway, the synchronous ballet wasn’t the only thing they ripped: they also copied Madness with their white suits walking in a straight line. Also the whole clip feels a bit 80s anime as well: it is really comic like, especially with the exaggerated samurai.
Best thing of this band is that they had Kim Jung Il as their drummer:
Kim Jung Il drumming for the CoConut Boys
Last sunday I posted some Touge drifting videos from 1995. The same user also uploaded a official drift video called Tuned Drift which apparently featured each month, just like Video Option once started.
The video contains only 3 seconds footage of a Carina GT-R AA63, but since it is ancient footage I did want to post the video anyway.
As you can see, it contains mostly Nissan Silvia S13s and 180SX RPS13s, a few AE86s and incidentally a Nissan Skyline R31, FC3S, Nissan Cifero A31 and a beaten up Toyota Chaser GX81.
One of the Levin AE86s (at 25 seconds) almost 100% resembles Wataru’s Levin in Initial D. Remember that Shuichi Shigeno only started drawing Initial D in 1995, so consider this pre-Initial D.
I must say that the Sprinter Trueno AE86 at 45 seconds is very nicely done. Actually it would still be very nicely tuned nowadays so it is definitely far ahead of its time!
I came across this last weekend:
Basically Osu! is a Drumming game for the PC for which many popular (JPop) tunes are available. The principle is basically the same as for Guitar Hero, however with Osu! you can create your own fields and challenges!
For me it is a bit too much since I already suffer from mild RSI from now and then, but for all other out there: Try it! It is fun to do!
You can find Osu! here:
Osu!
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