If you wear your hat backwards and your pants around your ankles, you'll be familiar with Liberty Walk.
Regular Driven readers will also have heard of the Japanese tuning company, given that we've reported on some of their wonderfully crazy antics in the past.
And their latest creation is another kei-car-gone-wild.
New Zealand no longer gets Daihatsu models new, though a very small number of them still leak in as Japanese imports. And one of the more popular models still brought in today is the Copen — a pseudo 'kei car' convertible with an inline 1.3-litre engine hooked up to the front wheels.
Whether that layout is as tempting as the rear-wheel drive 660cc convertibles and coupés that used to populate the kei car sphere (think Suzuki Cappuccino, Autozamn AZ-1, Honda Beat and its successor ... the Honda S660) is of limited relevance, because the Copen always unapologetically placed style over substance. It also, technically and literally, wasn't a kei car since its engine exceeded the tiny sub-category's 660cc limit.
Although, that all changed when the second-generation model was launched in 2014.
It was chiselled, with a more aggressive snout underlined by large vents and huge extensions on the headlights and taillights. Its engine dropped a cylinder too — the four popper traded for a more traditional 47kW turbocharged three-cylinder unit. This gave it better fuel economy, and gave it the kei-car status it was always meant to have.
Fast forward to today, and the aftermarket options for kei-car owners continue to grow and grow ... and the latest entry in the list is this comprehensive kit that turns a second-gen Copen into a baby Nissan R35 GT-R.
The bonnet lines and headlights form the perfect basis for a GT-R mimic, with a shrunken version of the GT-R's grill (complete with badge) completing the transformation at the front.
And the R35 name-dropping continues at the rear, via a faux carbon-fibre diffuser and exhaust package that follows the same outline as the diffuser on the GT-R.
The kit in its most basic form comes with just a front and rear bar, plus side skirts and a duck-tail spoiler. But the one you'll want (and the one pictured) is the full kahuna. It includes over-fenders, a GT wing, and new muffler tips on top of the base kit, and comes with a list price of ¥415,800 including tax.
Converted, that's just over NZ$5,000 — quite a lot for a few bits of plastic, but absolute chump change for any aspiring social peacocks wanting to outdo the slew of Lamborghinis and Ferraris at the next Cars & Caffeine.
Given a budget of $15,000–$20,000 for a current-gen Copen donor car, and you've got a showstopping little slice of JDM crowd bait ... for less than the price of a Toyota Corolla.
