Motor Fan has featured a one-off build that reads like a bar bet: a DC2 Honda Integra wearing the face of a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX and the tail of a Nissan 180SX. Three manufacturers, one car, and — this is the unsettling part — it works.
The stated motive is the purest one in custom car building: the owner wanted to build something unlike anything he had seen before. The result makes a convincing case.
How the transplants were done
This is not a bumper-and-stickers face swap. Up front, the build integrates genuine Evo IX headlights along with the core support area around them, retaining the DC2 fenders' mounting sections while grafting in Evo IX fender portions, with the bumper narrowed and reshaped to make the Mitsubishi metal sit naturally on the Honda body. At the rear, sheetmetal from a damaged 180SX donor car and its taillights were grafted onto the Integra, then blended with a D-MAX 180SX overfender kit to carry the body lines through. The whole project took about a year.
The engine did not escape attention either — and notably, it stayed Honda: a bore-up, high-compression build using 82 mm forged pistons from Toda Racing, breathing through a 5ZIGEN exhaust manifold and R1 titanium muffler. Under the crossbred bodywork, this is still a proper NA Honda screamer.
Why this kind of build is so JDM
What makes this build notable is not simply the mix of three Japanese brands, but the amount of fabrication required to make those parts read as one coherent design. Cutting in a different manufacturer's core support and rear panel is bodyshop-level surgery, not accessory fitting — and it reflects a particularly fearless corner of Japan's custom scene, where visual impact can matter more than preserving a single marque's identity. The craft is deadly serious even when the concept is absurd, which is exactly why fabrication-heavy one-offs like this travel so well on the international internet.
It joins a long domestic tradition of chimeras and rule-breakers — the same instinct we covered in Tech Art's bespoke AE86, pointed in the opposite direction: there, invisible perfectionism; here, visible provocation. Both took about the same amount of obsession.