You just need to take a little inspiration from Garage 54 when they made a “Straight 12" by bolting 3 old Lada engines together ... 

Looks like it’s an EX. The SE only came out in 2002. It’s a fairly base model, with little more added than AC and power windows/locks. (Yes, the LX back then still had manual windows)

The Mustang below had not changed substantively since its introduction, so fundamentally you’re still looking at a late 70s design.

“It’s harder for competitors to copy” ... I can totally see some bean counter in the boardroom saying that, but what a horrendously bad rationale for a particular design language being adopted. 

Yes, but the lump of a motor they put in the Delorean pretty much knee-capped its top speed ... 

Could you find enough of those intact to actually do it?  Most of them were falling apart on the dealer lots ... I don’t think entropy was kind to them. 

Everyone I know drools over what the car can do, not what it looks like.

Oddly, any of the cars you mention there were distinctly recognizable  on the road.  Even the remarkably bland Escort was always recognizable.  The Supra ... I don’t know - somehow it just never managed to look like anything to me.  

Quirky as those cars were, they at least looked distinctive.  

I know the Mk IV Supra is a hot car, performs well ... blah blah blah ... but frankly it foreshadows the worst of 1990s styling. Rounded and indistinct lines designed to make the wind tunnel tests happy but tend to look bland and meaningless. There’s one of these things near me, and every time I see it on the road…

When I bought my Mazda6, it was already over a year old, and the new model year versions had already come out.  I wandered into the dealership, and they knocked a sizeable chunk off the MSRP to start with.  

For the dollars, sure. Why not. Drive it for a couple of years as a DD and when something major fails, sell it off for parts if you’re not in love with it.

I wonder how much of the motivation for doing this is in the amount of slop in the steering?  Watch his steering wheel carefully, and he’s making the kind of corrections needed when the box is pretty worn.  It might be a case of needing both hands on the wheel at all times to keep the vehicle on track. 

I have no doubt that the technology is continuing to evolve. That said, I remain deeply skeptical of it on a number of levels, and the companies developing it need to get out from under the fear of “the competition will know what we’re up to” rock, and start talking to people about _how_ they are solving problems,…

If you think computers can emulate human cognition, you need to take some courses on human cognition.  There are things we’re really quite good at which current computer architectures are simply not suited to - approximation is a key aspect of that.  

We don’t “see into the future”, but humans are really good at approximating information - which is why we can think “oh, yeah - they’re going here” and be right a good chunk of the time. Computers are terrible at approximation.

Propane powered? Whatever possessed the builder to make that choice?

For me, these were always a bit of a “sad sack” car from Nissan. It’s like they took the ZX and went generic with it. The result was a luxo-cruiser that was neither particularly good at luxury or cruising. (and in spite of 200hp under the hood - not particularly fast either)

“Stunning”? Not really - it always looks to me like someone sprayed a gloss clear coat over top of primer and called it a day.

At a wild guess, there’s probably a dozen ways that particular sale could have been cobbled together. Perhaps MB knew, perhaps not (plausible deniability) - but just as it was always possible to get things that were restricted in the former Soviet Union (if you knew the right people), I imagine it’s equally possible…