Alibaba will sell you a brand new Toyota AE86 chassis, how stupid is it to buy one? – Jalopnik

Anyone who has ever restored an old car knows that many of its problems could be solved by starting with a new chassis, rather than dealing with the rust, road grime and gunk that has accumulated over the decades. We all wish we could start over with a clean slate, right? Building a body-in-white would be considerably easier than starting with a worn-out donor chassis, so when a Chinese concern announced that it would be selling an all-new reproduction chassis of Toyota’s iconic AE86 Corolla, we were naturally quite excited.

To find out if these Alibaba chassis were any good, the guys at BigTime bought one, as well as a worn-out AE86 donor chassis. Their idea was to try to fit all the parts from a worn example into the new chassis to see how good, or even bad, it could be. Things definitely didn’t go as smoothly as they had hoped, and some things didn’t look so good at first.

“Keep in mind this is a first,” says BigTime technician Mike Day. “So there’s going to be some things that don’t fit right, and they’re still fine-tuning the tooling, but there’s a lot of really bad stuff on this thing. Everything is crooked, this weld is unfinished and cracked, if you look at it from the front, this [passenger] The A-pillar is an inch and a half lower than that [driver] side.”

During the build process, the BigTime crew certainly found a few things that would give a Toyota engineer some pause; poor welds, a few quick disconnects, mismatched holes, poor assembly, missing hardware and incorrectly drilled components. Like Mike said, this was the first chassis, so maybe subsequent examples will be better than this, but do you really want to spend ten grand plus import duties to find out?

Now that they have a complete and working AE86 chassis, built from the ground up in just a few long days of work, what on earth can they do with it? These types of Chinese chassis, as you can imagine, do not come with a VIN tag, and certainly cannot be made legal or registrable without committing some mild fraud. However, if you want a track-only AE86 or a new drift car, this might be the way to go. If you end up sewing the panels and building a roll cage, it obviously doesn’t matter much whether the people in China have done a big job with metal glue.

We’ll have to wait and see how this project develops for them in future episodes, and how they’ll ultimately benefit from a clean and rust-free housing. A lot of things still need to be added to make it a fully functioning car, such as an interior and window glass. That said, it’s a very nice project and I look forward to seeing it completed. It’s already pretty loud, and knowing these guys, they’re going to make it even louder.

With a hot rotary engine going into the donor car, something like a 3S-GTE engine might be better suited for this thing. I would like to see one car as a drifter and one as a grip-oriented track car. Whatever they do, it won’t be boring.