Do you suffer from sudden pangs of nostalgia? Are you left with a yearning for the good old days? Well, I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the boutique Japanese car company obsessed with putting retro-designed bodies on top of relatively modern car chassis, Mitsuoka. Normally they stick to vintage car designs from Jaguar between the 1960s and 1970s. This time though, they’re taking things into the ugly 1980s.
They’ve taken the current Toyota RAV4 and given it a design treatment that screams retro. The Mitsuoka Buddy, as they call it, is still in its concept stage.
They showed the car in a number of colour choices, along with the choice of either monotone or two tone packages. Here it is in dual tone with steel rims in black with chrome hubcaps.
Here it is again in dual tone with steel rims in white with chrome caps. This is perhaps the most nostalgia-inducing look for the Mitsuoka Buddy.
These are the more standard ‘Monotone’ looks for the Buddy, shown with either silver finished or gunmetal grey rims that look like they’d be more at home on the original RAV4 design.
This looks is definitely a polarising one, but we think it’s definitely quite a unique direction for Mitsuoka.
The Mitsuoka Buddy will probably be offered with the 2.0L engine either in front wheel drive or all-wheel drive configurations. They’ll probably also offer the car with the 2.5L with hybrid power with 2WD or E-Four AWD.
About Mitsuoka
There are two divisions in the development department of our plant in Yokono (Toyama): Design and Engineering. We builds a Car from a Chassis and has the technology that can acquire model authorization in Japan and in various part of the World.
Our endless challenge and accumulated experience continues to enhance our technology. In our plant, the craftsmen devote themselves to building each car one by one by hand, and aim to earn customers’ trust and to develop cars of the highest quality. The cars have unique designs that other companies cannot imitate.
We will never stop striving for more. In installing our test facility, we work to achieve mass production of cars with our original chassis.
A fashion maker in the Automotive Industry
We introduced around 10 models of fashion cars since the “Viewt” in 1993. The cumulative produced volume of our fashion cars has reached 12000 units.
