Okay, with both the Niagara animals and our wallets being a whole lot fatter, it's time to see what we can buy.

Let's ask the fellow passengers on the Falls tour boat if they know about any car Shop around here.





: Ask someone


: Excuse me. Are there any car shops around here?


:: It's near the Skylon Tower.



Ah the Skylon Tower. A giant tower / restaurant overlooking the falls in the heart of Niagara tourist Central.





Exactly the kind of place we'd expect to find a mechanic / tuner shop.





Welcome


Ooh. This shop is different to all the others. Instead of a beige wall we have green. And the rockabilly loving mechanic / attendant is a girl.

Because we can't help ourselves, let's take a look at her available cars, since she's got a few we haven't seen elsewhere...




The Toyota Soarer 2.5GT - L

Ooh! a third generation Toyota Soarer - or Lexus SC300 as it was sold in western markets.

You may remember Wayne having the second generation version of this car in the first Zero4Champ. It was the one that It sparked the conversation about laaaace.

Speaking of luxury lace, it's noteworthy that this car came around the time of the birth of Lexus. Until around 2010 or so, in Japan, there was no such thing. You just had Toyota across the model ranges, from cheap models to luxury models and all in-between. To locals, Toyota was already a premium brand. But to compete with the Mercedes and BMWs of the world internationally in the 1990s, Toyota decided to invent its own ‘premium’ brand. Thus Lexus was born.

I bring this up, because I have a personal history with this car. Back in the early aughts, I had family involved with importing used cars from Japan and reselling them here. Occasionally, my father would buy, or borrow them, and I'd get exposed to some seriously cool cars, like 180sx, Silvia's, Skylines etc.

The Soarer was one of the cars that dad bought. It was the 1991 UZZ31 V8 powered top luxury model, and it was unlike anything I or my friends had seen before..



It had airbag adjustable suspension, full electric everything interior, leather out the wazoo, 7 speaker sound system, 12 disc CD stacker, reverse camera, touchscreen, GPS Navigation and inbuilt CRT Terrestrial TV… in a car from 1991!



You couldn’t get a (then) modern car with those features for anything approaching the price we imported it from Japan for. The Lexus version of the same car was over twice the price.

I now know, like my Century, it inherited much of these features from the Lexus LS400 / Celsior - which Toyota spent over a billion dollars to develop, to establish itself as the industry leader in luxury cars and launch the Lexus brand internationally.

Dad's favourite party trick was to balance a coin on the V8 engine, start the car and show how smooth it was. Sadly we only had this car for a year or so, he sold it to a wealthy classmate of mine whose father had the then-current Lexus 430 aka the fourth generation Soarer.

But, I disgress, because luxury wasn't this cars only strong point. Like lots of Japanese cars of the era there was a ton of variants.

In addition to the luxury v8s, there were base variants with regular trim and naturally aspirated engines as well as sports focused variants, with manual transmission and the same twin turbo inline 6 that the fourth generation Toyota Supra is famous for.

The one for sale here, is that sports model.

The Soarer remains today a cool and seriously underrated car. Unlike other JDM heroes like the Skyline or Supra they're actually still affordable, though the early years of cheap imports saw alot of sorry examples being brought into Australia, and most of them you see around nowadays are are poorly maintained base models with peeling clear coat.

I still have yet to see another with the full luxury spec ours had.

But, other than this being a cool car, it being here highlights another important fact…





The Soarer is in the front cover of this game! And now we've seen both it and the FD3S RX7, it fills me with confidence that the mighty Honda NSX, also featured on the cover, might actually be in this game!

Let's see what else she has available… maybe there's an NSX here!




Eunos 500

The Eunos 500, sadly, is not an NSX….

In fact, I've never even heard of this car, but apparently it was sold here in Australia as the Eunos 500, in Europe as the Mazda Xenos and... not sold in the USA at all.

(Where on earth are these people getting their car inventory? They're all Japanese spec and right hand drive.)

Looking on the various car sales sites in Australia, I can only see a single model being for sale... so I guess they didn't sell many of them here…

Seems like a perfectly capable little compact run about... But not the sort of thing that excites us.

What's next? Hopefully a NSX…





Isuzu PA-NERO X


...Well… it's got an X in the title…

I had never heard of this one either, but looking it up I realize it's simply another second generation Isuzu Piazza.

Didn’t this game already have a Isuzu Piazza for sale in LA?



yes... it did. Comparing the two, it appears that this is the 1.6 litre, cheaper version, and the one in LA is the 1.8 litre, more expensive version.

Why this is the car in the game with two variants, I don't know, but I'm not complaining. I'm hoping the Holden Piazza, Australianised variant shows up.





Diahatsu Charade GT-XX


Yet another car with an X in the title but not a NSX…

However - I remember the humble Diahatsu Charade well. They had a reputation here for being a cheap, reliable shitbox. The idea of having a car only having a 3 cylinder engine at the time, had seemed absurd.

I had a friend with an early 90s one, and I remember he had a manually operated choke in the cabin for starting the car. Something I haven't seen in anything post the 1970s.

This one, however, is the performance focused model with a 1 litre, turbo charged, twin cam engine… Phwoaaaaahhh. It's like a super kei car.





Honda Beat

Okay NOW we're talking!

A rear wheel drive, mid-engined, lightweight, performance-oriented Honda?

No that's not the NSX... It's the beat. It's like a NSX... in kei car form.

Like it's amazing contemporaries, the Suzuki Cappuccino and the Autoam AZ-1, it's a kei car hyper focused on driveability and being a blast to drive.

It's blisteringly powerful 64 horsepower, three cylinder engine is made up for by the fact the whole car only weighs 760 kg. It's the type of car that's acceleration is indirectly proportional to the size of the drivers waistline.

And since we haven't had a good Japanese car commercial in awhile, here's the Honda Beat ad for your midship amusement.





I would love this thing in real life...


Incidentally, if you have a spare 20 minutes I highly recommend the following Hagerty video, which gives a great intro to the history of kei cars, and does a direct comparison between the Beat, the Cappuccino and the Autozam.





Essential viewing if you're in the market for a car purchase that will make you look as cool as this guy:





And with that, that's all the cars in this location that we haven't seen yet. So we have a total of 48 cars in this game! No NSX just yet, but I'm holding onto hope.