QotW: What’s the best Japanese car for a midlife crisis?

Years ago you gave up the sport compact with the cold air intake and blue HIDs. There was a kid on the way and you needed the cash for a minivan. In a blink decades passed. You no longer need to slurp instant ramen every meal to save up for a set of rims, but even if you had new wheels there’s nothing cool to put them on. The kids think family trips are “cringe” and would rather be on social media than utter a single syllable to mom and dad. They Uber everywhere anyway, so why are you commuting in a 7-seater? “That’s it,” you think, “I’m going down to the automall and regaining my youth!”

What’s the best Japanese car for a midlife crisis?

The most entertaining comment by next week will receive a prize. Scroll down to see the winner of last week’s QotW, “What automotive scenario would you conjure up on the holodeck?“.

Before we get into the AotW we must first issue a correction, because in the original asking of the QotW we claimed that Star Trek contained no automotive content whatsoever. That was wrong, as Collegiate Autodidact pointed out. JM followed up with an episode in which a car was actually on the holodeck, a 1969 Camaro in Voyager. Oh well, to err is human.

Many comments conjured up historic scenarios that few individuals were privy to. streetspirit wanted to be there at building of the Hino Samurai. Kyuusha Corner chose to be immersed in the early days of Japanese auto racing at Tamagawa Speedway in 1936. dillon would beam into the Toyota 2000GT’s speed record run at Yatabe Circuit in 1966 (be sure to ask the computer for an umbrella).

It also made sense to ask for scenarios that would be risky as hell in real life, as the holodeck has built-in safety features that (mostly) prevent death and injury to life forms within it. So why not put BlitzPig in the driver’s seat of a Ferrari 330 P4 at Spa, or TheJWT in a Top Secret test car in one of Smoky Nagata’s 200mph runs on public roads?

Alan went whole hog trying to get the computer to extrapolate an entire future in which cars did not become iPhones on wheels. Talk about diverting power from shields. Others opted for settings of a more personal nature, like dankan‘s drive down the Japanese coast in an MR2 or Franxou‘s Groundhog Day scenario with a 240SX.

The winner this week was JW, who vividly described the experience of taking a Honda S2000 to the track. Presumably the computer would have an archive of every website ever created, too:

That holodeck had better be running Starfleet’s fastest CPU and graphics processors, because my request to relive 9000 RPM in my Honda S2000 down the front straight of Texas World Speedway is going to take serious power to reproduce.
And the sound has to be perfect—reverb off the wall on the straight, climbing through the revs in every turn, because the perfect lap means you never drop out of VTEC. And finally, wind through the hair, because of course the top is down.
Yes, this was our life for so many years at TWS… best immortalized in in-car video, which we’ll provide to train the holodeck AI.
Unfortunately, our video showing this on Temple of VTEC was lost—along with that great site

Omedetou, your comment has earned you a set of decals from the JNC Shop!