Vigo
MegaDork
1/28/20 2:30 p.m.
A Skyline GTR, maybe. If you spend actual money renting any of the cheaper import stuff you're probably paying almost as much as the importer paid for it in the first place. There are a lot of JDM cars I'm interested in, but my lack of interest in the interests of the people who import them probably means i'd need to import one my damn self to feel like the value quotient was reasonable. That sort of logic leaves a pretty big hole around the whole idea of renting. 
That said, if the price was right I'd certainly consider it. Whether the price CAN be right probably depends on how much the owner is paying in insurance to cover this kind of use, since realistically most import cars aren't worth any more actual money than a new Elantra or Malibu you can rent for $27/day.
I've driven a RHD car once. It was a manual. I honestly didn't think it was a big deal. But that's also true of the lead-ups to pretty much every car accident people manage to have in their LHD cars, so my opinions on the difficulty of driving are.. fringe i guess. I do regret not buying that car. It was a Nissan Pao and I still want one!!
Nah, I just go over to japan and drive them there at the dealers. Really none of the cars mentioned outside the GTR are really that exotic. There are enough of them in the US that I can go test drive them in many different places. And being that it's in Vegas, there really isn't any good place to drive them anyway.
In reply to bmw88rider :
Plenty of great places to drive around Vegas. I went here in a rented Corvette:
Did it. Rented a 2012 gtr. Went on track. Disappointed. Had an instructor ride along and only shouted things like "you missed that apex" and "now we're JUST driving around the corner!" Never meet your heroes.
Flipside- rented a new gt86 from Toyota themselves in japan. Wrecklessly drove it down Hakone skyline Touge. Had a blast. Would do again. And cost me a lot less than the GTR.
How about an IDM??? Not sure why Japan gets all of the "domestic only" love- when Italy and France have a TON of cars we have a tough time getting. Let alone Germany. Or even England.
So JDM, IDM, FDM, EDM, GDM, etc.... KDM, too.
In reply to alfadriver :
Only tangentially related to the topic at hand, but an acquaintance of mine who does some importing told me once that Japan is one of the best places to get oddball European cars from, because their strict inspections mean they are almost always in better shape than examples that come from Europe. He particulary cautioned against getting cars from the UK and somewhere else in Europe I can't remember off hand.
pointofdeparture said:
In reply to alfadriver :
Only tangentially related to the topic at hand, but an acquaintance of mine who does some importing told me once that Japan is one of the best places to get oddball European cars from, because their strict inspections mean they are almost always in better shape than examples that come from Europe. He particulary cautioned against getting cars from the UK and somewhere else in Europe I can't remember off hand.
Only tangentially related to your tangential topic, but I've always wondered why there are eleventeen different places to shop online for JDM cars, but basically nowhere that I can go to shop for European cars.
In reply to therieldeal :
I wholeheartly agree.
Don't get me wrong, I love JDM cars as much as the next guy, but I would like to see more stuff coming from Europe. There has to be thousands--if not millions--of amazing cars that are turning 25 years old this year.
In reply to therieldeal :
Plenty of people are out there doing it (the European grey market has been around much longer than the Japanese one) but I don't think they are out there marketing themselves as aggressively as the JDM importers. I do see a lot of Lancia Delta Integrales and E30 touring models in particular being brought over though. So they are definitely around.
For general browsing of Euro stuff just for the fun of it I've found AutoScout24 is pretty good. My French car affliction has me occasionally looking at Renault 21s, Alpine A610s, Peugeot 106s and the like...
In reply to alfadriver :
I'm still planning to import a proper EBM (BDM?) Midas. Probably the only car I can afford that's had some input from a certain Gordon Murray, Esq.
Here is one, in all its glory:
Photograph Courtesy Nissan
