NISMO hints at offering reproduction parts for all vintage Nissans

Image courtesy NICOClub.com.

Twenty years ago Nissan experimented with offering its vintage cars restored and on the showroom floor. Now it appears the company wants to take another stab at catering to the old-Nissan collector with a reproduction parts program.

Revealed earlier this week as part of a press conference announcing the NISMO Roadcar division, the Heritage Parts Program, which NISMO will oversee, will initially provide restoration parts for the R32 Skyline GT-R. However, according to NISMO’s Takao Katagiri, the company intends to offer reproduction and restoration parts for other vintage Nissan (and presumably Datsun, Infiniti, and Prince) models should the R32 program prove successful.

Exactly which models, Katagiri didn’t say. However, Nissan would presumably have a head start should it decide to offer restoration parts for 240Zs, given its 1996-1997 campaign to buy back, restore, and resell 1972-spec 240Zs.

While Nissan didn’t restore those cars itself – instead, the company farmed out the task to Pierre’Z Service Center in Hawthorne, California – according to Japanese Nostalgic Car, the company did raid its new-old-stock inventory for carpets, seats, dashes, and upholstery and, when it couldn’t find NOS parts, it commissioned new runs of reproduction parts. Rather than hoard them, Nissan apparently made those reproduction parts available over the counter as well and even went so far as to back the parts with the same 12-month/12,000-mile warranty the restored cars came with.

Only 37 cars came about from that experiment – a result of initial poor quality reports and steep asking prices – but it did generate plenty of publicity for Nissan and possibly foretold to what extent the company will support the Heritage Parts Program.

Nissan’s Heritage Parts Program is scheduled to kick off this fall. The company did not specify whether the parts would be available just in Japan or in the United States as well.