It must be fun to be a student at Nissan Gakuen, the company’s technical college in Japan. Besides learning skills that will likely propel them to a long, successful career in some facet of carbuilding, they also have a hand in creating some seriously fascinating automotive oddities. You may be familiar with their Fairlady Z crossover and wagon (the latter used a Leaf’s hatch), but Gakuen students get up to builds of older vehicles, too. And three of them will be on display at the upcoming Tokyo Auto Salon next month.
Each project, created by students from Nissan’s Aichi and Kyoto schools, is vastly different. One is a last-gen Nissan Micra restyled to look like a Bluebird 312 with some original Bluebird parts. Another is a Skyline R30 sedan modified in the image of its two-door RS Silhouette Formula cousin. But my personal favorite is an original Nissan Sunny that’s gotten its fenders blown out and now looks like a KPGC10 Nissan Skyline GT-R built for drifting.
We’ll start with the Micra/Bluebird mashup. The students call this the March Eloura; “March” is Japan’s name for the Micra, and “Eloura” is a made-up word that combines “era” and “luce,” which is Italian for “light.” That’s a lot of conceptual preamble, but what the Gakuen crew has cooked up here looks almost like a modern Pike car with its retro grille, circular headlights, and stylish white roof and wheels.
The Re30 Skyline Silhouette—”Re” for “reborn,” “respect,” and “remake”—aims “to convey the energy of motorsports” during the ’80s, per a translated Nissan release. The splitter is extreme, to put it lightly, leading to the Skyline Silhouette’s iconic and deeply vented hood, with its rails on both edges. The sharp rear wing mounted at the base of the window completes the look, and of course, Work Equip 01 rims always suit an ’80s JDM creation. The students thoughtfully preserved the sedan’s blue interior, which was the obviously correct choice.
Finally, we get to that Sunny. Like the Re30, it also aims to capture the enthusiasm of cars from a bygone era, but this one harks back a bit earlier, to the ’70s. Modeling the cartoonish fenders apparently required plenty of trial and error, which isn’t surprising at all; sculpting that curvy shape until it’s just right sounds like an eternity in man-hours. Under the hood is an SR20DE four-cylinder out of an S15 Silvia, and the interior was reupholstered and re-trimmed with wood grain. It’s a shame we don’t have pics of it, because it sounds lovely.
That’s really our only regret for the moment: Nissan’s released just one photo for every car, so we will have to wait until the Tokyo Auto Salon kicks off on January 9 to get a better look around these stunning builds. In the meantime, congrats to the students involved. They’ve outdone themselves as usual, and have plenty to be proud of here.