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San Diego has all the luck: great weather, barking sea lions, and ocean breezes. And now it’s going to be the first city to get a Flex Ventures dealership outside of Japan. If you’re not familiar with Flex, it’s a Tokyo-based firm that creates restomods based on Toyota Land Cruisers and Hiace vans. At its newly minted San Diego dealership announced this month, Flex will sell retrofitted Toyota Land Cruisers called “The 106” and “The Wonder.”
In Japan, each of its 50 dealerships specializes in either the Toyota SUV or the van. The firm takes used ’80s and ’90s models and turns them into better-than-new restomods that are renovated on the inside and given a classic 1960s-era facelift on the outside. Land Cruisers are classic beasts as is, but with these renovations they’re spectacular.
Feast your eyes on the before-and-after renovation look of a Land Cruiser here:
“Based on demand, now was the right time to make this debut into the U.S. market, and San Diego is the right location for us to make this move,” Flex Corporation Director of International Business Development Yohei Nakamura said in a statement. “Using a bespoke concept, customers can use Flex’s online simulator to customize their vehicles to make for a true, one-of-a-kind driving experience, which is the niche that we have curated and elevated.”
Scheduled to open later this year, the San Diego dealership will also debut the company’s first foray with the Toyota Tacoma with a retrofitted version that I’m hoping has a wild ’60s or ’70s color scheme.
In the meantime, if you want to start experimenting with your own dream restomod (and you can read Japanese), you can head to the company’s online configurator to see what’s possible.
I’m already thinking about how good that blue Land Cruiser would look in my garage. Considering some restomod workups can cost in the six-figure range, that may be out of my budget. On the Japanese configurator site, The Wonder model is listed at about 3 million yen, which translates to roughly $22,000. No word yet on what they will cost in the U.S., but we will keep you posted.
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