Motor Fan has published a feature on a Y31 Nissan Gloria with a backstory that explains itself in one sentence: the owner's father went through six failed automatic transmissions in his own Y31 years ago, and when his son set out to modify his own car, the advice was blunt — swap it to a manual.

Yuki Hashimoto has now owned his Gloria Gran Turismo SV, the late-model Y31 with the VG20DET twin-cam turbo V6, for sixteen years. He bought it at eighteen. His father Takayuki drove a new Y31 back in the day and, by his own account in the feature, went through six failed five-speed automatics. Those failures ultimately shaped the plan for his son's car.

How to manual-swap a Y31 Gloria Gran Turismo SV

The swap was far from straightforward: the feature says several shops declined the job before R Performance, a specialist in Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, agreed to take it on. The recipe they built:

  • An R33 Skyline five-speed gearbox as the donor transmission
  • A VG-compatible bellhousing to mate that gearbox to the V6
  • The propeller shaft extended by 70 mm to make up the length difference
  • The parking brake converted from the automatic's foot pedal to a hand lever
  • A stock S13 Silvia clutch pedal, modified to fit

The engine itself was left alone apart from intake and exhaust work — the emphasis is on driver involvement rather than additional power. Supporting mods run to a Nismo strut tower bar, a Kakimoto Racing exhaust and JIC coilovers.

The VIP sedan as a family heirloom

The Y31 Cedric and Gloria hardtops are the founding stock of VIP style, but features about them usually center on stance and interiors. This one is about mechanical stewardship: a driveline rethought after the factory automatic's poor record in the family, executed with junkyard-logic parts-bin engineering — R33 box, S13 pedal, custom bellhousing — of the kind that keeps thirty-plus-year-old sedans in daily service.

And the story loops back a generation. After the feature came about, the father bought his own car again: the same late-model Gloria Gran Turismo SV, purchased three years ago. Two Y31s in one family, one converted to the manual the father wished his own had been.

For overseas readers, the Y31 sits in an interesting spot: long overshadowed by the Z32 and GT-R in the export imagination, every example is now past the US 25-year threshold, and cars like this one — sorted, driven, mechanically rethought — are what the VIP end of the tuning world looks like at its best.