A sad reality of the classic car game is that the cheaper examples of icons that you and I can actually afford are usually in pretty bad shape, especially in the rust belt. It’ll take a whole lot of time and money to make them nice, regardless of what reality TV has sold us over the past few decades. However, instead of spending countless hours welding in patch panels, wouldn’t it be easier to just buy an entirely new body? For a handful of classics such as the original Ford Bronco, you can do just that through Alibaba, but it comes with a handful of catches.
Over the past 25 years, Alibaba has established itself as a business-to-business titan for wholesale goods, offering a platform for just about anything you can think of that’s made in China, including Jason’s Changli electric vehicle. Obviously, you can find the wares of several popular aftermarket parts companies on there, but the sheer selection means you can think bigger than that. Much, much bigger.
How about an entire tub for a first-generation Ford Bronco? We’re talking about the whole enchilada from floors to inner sills to wheel wells to fenders to doors, all crated up and ready to be put together and painted. All yours for $7,000 per body. If you’re starting with an absolute rotbox, that doesn’t seem like a bad deal, and it’s far from the only complete body on offer.
You know what ’70s coupe was brilliant to drive but difficult to keep from rusting? The Datsun 240Z. These Japanese performance cars were incredibly popular in North America, but many remaining examples require extensive welding to be structurally sound. An aftermarket shell for something body-on-frame like a Ford Bronco is one thing, but an entire unibody made in China and shipped over in a crate is some wild stuff. All this for $8,000 per body.
So far, so promising, right? Well, not so fast. If it was this easy to give your rusted-out project car a brand new body, everyone would do it, but there are some good reasons why these brand new shells aren’t incredibly popular, starting with how they’re sold. See, because Alibaba is a B2B commerce site, buyers need to purchase nigh-on everything in bulk. Both the Bronco body and the 240Z body mentioned earlier can only be ordered in minimum batches of ten, meaning they might work as group buys, but not as one-off purchases for singular projects.
Secondly, there’s the fact that transferring the VIN of an existing car onto a new shell opens up a legal minefield, as such a dramatic step may or may not be legal depending on where you live. A new body may require a car to be titled as a specially constructed vehicle, or it might be illegal where you live due to falling under anti-VIN swapping laws originally designed to fight car theft.
Finally, quality control in itself is a bit of an unknown. The fit and finish of reproduction parts is often only as good as the parts they were cloned from, so who knows how an entire body shell is going to go? It might be good enough for a race car, but you might need to put in loads of work to get concours-grade panel gaps. For instance, several members of the Northern Ireland-based RMS Motoring forum have noted quality control issues with Chinese-built Ford Escort bodyshells due to the quality of the car they were based on.
However, if you can get everything to work for you, a brand-new bodyshell isn’t a bad way to speed along restoration of a seriously rotten car. Better yet, it’s a great starting point for building a historic race car that isn’t as precious as an original. That way you likely wouldn’t have to worry about road registration at all.
(Photo credits: Alibaba sellers)
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Pretty sure you can do an entire mustang/Camaro/square body just by buying parts from a catalog. I’m curious how poor the fit is on the cheap Chinese ones.
I’ll take 1 AMC Eagle…ok gimmee 10
You can buy single items on aliexpress, these included. Link
Theseus’ Bronco
Oh yeah.. don’t forget since it is steel auto parts, US Customs will probably slap tariffs on the parts. Unless the seller marks the order as $1 on the customs / manifest form /s but not /s.
Also I rather people “resto mod” add LS, Coyote etc on these replicas than messing with originals. Does original VIN really matter realistically when you dump in a LS3 into a bronco?
Replacement shells have been around for a while. There where Philippine companies making repro Jeeps since the 70s. Heritage Motor parts have several BL models including MG and Mini, and the MG RV8 actually used Heritage shells. you can also get most of a Landrover. For a while you could get Morris Oxford body shells from India. The only thing new is getting it from someplace that never made the car.
I haven’t looked into the specifics around repop bodyshells in years, but from what I remember it’s a lot easier to title something as a replica of an existing car than it is to title a homebuilt original design. As long as you have some paperwork to prove that it’s a repop body that you bought and not something you stole or cut the VIN off, it shouldn’t be hard to register it as a replica. At least in most US states.
I wonder if they could be titled as a specialty vehicle or replica if not using this to rebuild an original car. Like, for the 240Z, taking this shell and adding a tube frame where necessary and any drivetrain you want (emissions have to meet engine year of manufacture, but IDK if that means it can be any old engine the same age or newer than the age of the vehicle the shell belongs to, like with a replica, or something else) so that you’re basically building a new car using the shell as a base (hopefully it’s straight enough to do so or someone knows how to build/where to buy a good custom chassis to mount it to, though being unibody, that’s a whole other question). It certainly won’t be a cheap route, but it might be a nice clean slate for a total custom build. Does a unibody on custom chassis count as homebuilt or would that be considered a kit? Former just needs receipts and proof of tax, but for the latter, I assume there’s nothing that comes with the shell that would pass for a CoO, so I don’t know how that would work. Then again, I live in MA and our RMV sucks and it’s probably at the discretion of whatever inspector you get to call it whatever is the least convenient regardless of whatever you’ve been told by the RMV previously and it might not be such a problem in other states.
I’d expect so, in some states a reproduction vehicle is actually easier to title than an experimental/homebuilt. Z cars do well with SBC swaps since they move the center of gravity back a bit, but a Tesla rear axle would probably also work well.
Guess I have to add “buy 10 240Z bodies from Alibaba and try every drivetrain variant I can” to the list of weird stuff to do when I win the lottery.
I think whether or not there’s a certificate of origin would be the determiner, though. With a CoO, you could maybe claim it’s a kit replica, but without it, it would likely be considered a homebuilt, like if I threw old car body parts on a new custom chassis. I think it’s one of those things that would be up to the inspector. When I was designing an enclosed tadpole trike using a Cessna 150 Omnivision fuselage, I talked to the RMV about classification as it was technically a motorcycle at the time, but the enclosed cockpit (and really everything about it but the missing wheel) made it more of a car, so I wanted to know which standards to build it to (lighting is different and I forget what else) or if it could even be registered at all with an enclosed roof were it classified as a motorcycle (though, I suppose, being a sliding canopy, I could remove it for inspection). After talking to several people, including some manager, I was basically left with a shrug and that the state police inspector would tell me what they’d classify it as on individual discretion. This of course, would be after I built it, so WTF, yeah, let me just spend a bunch of time and money on it to find out I possibly can’t register it! Anyway, that’s friggin’ MA, so your mileage will definitely vary in a more reasonable or laid back state.
I’d attach a junkyard VIN (if I could find one). Not ‘legal’, but I’m not trying to sell it as an original car. At best it would be a reconstructed junker.
I think MA is not terrible for registering a kit car. Factory Five is located here, and they and other groups have done some lobbying to smooth out getting titles and registrations for kit cars.
As beautiful as I think the original Z is, the suspension design is quite dated. It may make more sense to tube frame the whole thing and hang reproduction Z panels on it. I’m not going to daily this thing, may as well make it crazy. I’d do that before buying ten full Z’s of questionable quality and hoping I find a home for the other 9.
If you could find one in a junk yard (probably not in MA), it would likely be on a destroyed title or whatever it’s classified as that’s either difficult or impossible to get road legal again (I forget, I just remember a JY dog telling me that they would save cars they thought they could repair and resell as runners out front, but any car that passed through the gates ended up with marked titles that meant the cars were effectively destroyed or something to that effect so that the VIN would throw a flag at the registry that was either a mess to sort out or impossible. I had been asking about a decent-looking TR6 they had that had passed through the decidedly unpearly gates and he couldn’t sell it as a restorable car). If you found a private sale basketcase for cheap, you could swap the (cracked!) dash with the VIN on it and you could probably weasel a patch of the old firewall VIN and door sill and shock tower tags (or whatever it had, I can’t remember now) onto the new one and clean it up nice enough and, with the legal paperwork, you’d probably be fine (even skipping the firewall might be fine as it’s unlikely someone would bother to check and you could always just say it was replaced—it’s a 50+ year old Datsun after all!).
If you have a valid Nissan VIN, though, it’s not a kit car. I’m wondering how you would register these shells as an all new vehicle. It’s not exactly a kit car as it’s not sold as such unless the shell has a CoO, then maybe it could be argued that it is, but IMO, it’s best not to screw with the RMV, (they can f with you just for fun as I found out this summer when registering a utility trailer) which leaves it as either a specialty car or replica. I’m not sure how different that ultimately is except when it comes to drivetrains. It seems clear that any engine from 1969 on could be used as long as the emissions equipment for the year of engine manufacture was intact (with some new parts, like O2 and cat, if that applies) if it’s a replica, but I’m not as sure when it comes to specialty homebuilt. Were it me, I’d call them (and call three different RMV people, then average the answers, I guess?) and just word it as I’m building a replica (because that seems to be the most straightforward route), what do I need to do to get it registered, VIN, drivetrain requirements, etc.? All that written, you probably still want a junker for the glass and lights and such that probably aren’t available new and aren’t easy to fab, but then you have a VIN you could theoretically use, which leads back to paragraph 1!
I think one would only do this if they were installing a newly designed chassis/suspension that was stronger with modern geometry. My FWD mk1 Legacy wagon was a better handling car (and quicker) than my S30s. They were probably something in their day against flexible fliers with live axles or swing arms, but that day is long ago. If you had a restored one to cruise around in and want the vintage experience, they’re great, but if you want something that would really perform, you’d be changing so much stuff out that you might as well start fresh and this project would probably cost more than a restored real one in the end, so I would say to go all out.
I think you need to move a bit further from the cities.
A few years ago, I had taken the rear plate off my Miata over the winter because I designed some business cards that looked like MA plates (I wanted to get the proportions right). When the weather broke in the spring, I took the Miata out for a blast. The car’s pretty loud and I was not driving politely. I drove by several cops on my more than one hour run.
On my way home I was stopped at a red light and a pedestrian mentioned I should get that home before I get busted for not having plates. I had completely forgotten the plate wasn’t on the car.
I realized that I’m old. I was driving a car that didn’t look like a kid’s car. I am in an expensive area with a lot of interesting cars. The cops around here have probably learned that pulling over an old guy in an old car can just be a hassle in the long run.
Doing the same thing in a my previous city, I would have been busted within fifteen minutes.
I’m pretty sure I could pull the VIN and plates from any of my cars, slap the VIN on an Alibaba Z and get away with it as long as I don’t try to sell it. It’s more risk than I’d be willing to take (Z’s can still be found), but I think I’d get away with it.
It was the shittier city RMV that I finally went to and had no problem with to finally get registered. I’m in the uppity part of Merrimack Valley, not Boston.
I never get pulled over anymore either. I don’t have a loud car and never have because I hate loud exhaust (it’s never engine, it’s always just some trashy exhaust noise), but I do drive a bit fast (if no worse than most other people) and have a bright blue GR86. Pretty sure it’s due to getting old and if I got caught with a missing plate, I doubt I’d have much problem at all having a valid registration in the car and just telling the cop I forgot to put it back on.
The inspector is a state police officer. It has little to nothing to do with where you are in MA or the RMV, it’s luck of the draw with who you get, but I don’t think there would be much problem calling it a replica.
While it’s unlikely anyone would notice a missing VIN on the firewall of a “restoration”, I mention it because it could be noticed and that’s not something I’d leave open. Like, when you kill someone, you don’t say, “f’ it, these small town cops will miss those small details I didn’t clean up” unless you don’t care about getting caught.
I’m also in the Merrimack Valley. A little less uppity but more coastal.
I wasn’t even talking about getting it inspected. I was talking about buying a Nissan anything, titling it, registering it, recycling everything but the VIN and just carrying on with the new car wearing the dead car’s plates.
Unless you’re street racing, the cops aren’t likely to give much of a damn. As long as the donor car is old enough to not need emissions testing and is somewhat similar in style to your new creation. This wouldn’t trigger any state police inspections – on paper it’s just a 1983 200SX or whatever.
I’m fully aware this is illegal. I don’t plan to do it, and I’m not encouraging anyone to do it. I do think you could get away with it as long as you stay off cop radar. You’re also going to be SOL if you ever have an insurance claim.
This whole thing sounds like a bad idea, but people go through with a lot of bad car ideas. After all, this discussion started with bringing in ten alibaba reproduction car bodies of unknown quality.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing, then. This is all just musings on options on what to do with these as I certainly won’t be buying alibaba shells, either, even if they were sold individually.
I forgot I actually got pulled over in Boxford a little while ago—first time in years—just riding along behind someone in a Sentra and honestly not thinking about it and the cop gave us both a verbal warning without even mentioning that I don’t have a front plate. We were going about 40 in a zone that drops to 25 for a few hundred yards before going back up. Seemed like he was mostly making a show for the residents as he said they were complaining about speeders and that’s certainly an issue, but it’s more a night thing as I can hear them even through the woods and some distance away and it sounds mostly like motorcycles and Hemi Dodges and they’re certainly going well over 40.
WOW… I didn’t know about Factory Five. Being in MA myself, I may need to take a drive down. And I was surprised at how reasonable the prices on their kits are.
They have open house events, definitely check them out!
Another reason why the quality is poor is that the dies they use to stamp these parts were either purchased used (worn out) or copied. It’s really hard to get good parts that way. Especially at Alibaba price points
Broncos have a unique loophole for swapping the body in that the VIN isn’t attached to the tub. It’s on the glovebox door, and the one that really matters is on the frame.
You can buy these bodies from companies in the US, assembled and ready to go, in quanties of 1, for 10-20k.
I’m surprised Ford itself hasn’t done this, given the popularity of Bronco.
I say this b/c Ford Performance will in fact sell you a genuine Ford, body-in-white, first gen Mustang shell.
Sure, same titling/registration issues, but it’s the real deal from the OEM. I can only imagine the price.
You have been able to buy reproduction Jeep tubs and frames for most of the CJ and military models from the CJ7/8 back to the MB/GPW from, I want to say, Indonesia for a few years now.
I have not seen one in person yet, but the word is that they have fitment issues, and often, mounts do not line up without modification.
I would imagine you are looking at the same issue with these.
Plus, the shipping is going to be hefty and I think there may be a tax when it enters the country.
I’m pretty sure you could buy those from JC Whitney decades ago.
Don’t worry about Taxes. I’m pretty sure they’ll just write ‘gift’ on the commercial invoice. No problems at all!
Nothing new. The J.C. Whitney catalog (remember those? I sure do!) had complete Jeep CJ body structures, plus darn near every other piece you’d need to build your own CJ. I think they had MB panels and parts as well.
They were made in the Philippines, IIRC. Don’t remember if you could get Jeepney bodies, but think you could. Prices weren’t awful, but I think you had to wait for shipping.
And that was only the tip of the J.C. Whitney iceberg. They offered almost everything you’d need for any car — or parts they claimed would substitute, right down to Hollywood Wolf Whistles, fuzzy dice, and “spinner” hubcaps.
Oh, for one of their catalogs and a time machine….
I want a copy of Road&Track track from 1970 and a time machine. Ferrari GTO’s for $3500, Bugatti Type 35s for about the same.
I’m trying not to be greedy!
I’d pay list price for just about anything in the R&T 1954 Road Test Annual!
Some of the best money I ever spent was $25 in high school for a PA system that made animal noises and other sound effects. The car it went into was $500. I will never approach that much fun value for dollar again in my life.
Beat me by hours. 🙂
“Hollywood Wolf Whistles’
Does DT have one of these since he went Hollywood?
He SHOULD! It could go near the Bermuda Bell!
You can buy a complete ’65 to ’70 Mustang body as a kit or fully assembled. I forget the company that makes them, but they’re legit high quality parts. Very, very expensive. Not any cheaper than buying a halfway decent original car and fixing it up. I’ve seen YouTube builds of these and they manage to title them as a brand new 1960’s cars where you don’t have to worry about modern safety features and emissions controls. A few really crazy people have grafted all the 60’s Mustang exterior body panels onto a late model Mustang. Classic styling with modern drivetrain, interior, and suspension.
Another thing people do is use parts from that company to convert a notchback Mustang to a fastback. Notchback Mustangs are still somewhat affordable. I’d consider that as a project if I had the time and space.
Took my brain a minute to get there, but the company is called Dynacorn….
https://dynacornclassicbodies.com/
I thought there was another company doing these also in the midwest. I had started planning a build starting with one of these bodies and quickly realized what a hassle it would be to find everything. It’s a great solution if you have a donor car with body issues, but finding and restoring original parts or buying reproductions adds up very quickly. And for a race it makes more sense to have a tube chassis built and hang fiberglass panels on it.
There probably is, Dynacorn is just the one I’m familiar with, my hyperfocused OCD half loves the idea of building a car from scratch, creating a giant spreadsheet of parts with shipping details and inventorying everything and building the car from the ground up.
In reality I’d just have a garage/house/yard full of boxes, none of the right tools, and bankruptcy court eating up all my time.
I’d have a well-documented trailer load of parts for the next guy.
A cousin of mine ordered a container full of old Jaguar rep wheels (pre 80 ones). I think he came ahead even though 20% of them are junk. Another friend ordered 3 commercial ice cream machines, 2 that do the work and one as a spare. That’s for the price of a ice cream machine from a North American dealer.
The thing with Alibaba purchases always buy enough spares with your order. I bet you if you order the minimum of 10 you probably get 8 whole bodies with the order out of the order out of the box. But since it is just bare metal (doesn’t look like they are even primed) and if you have the know how you should be able to finese all 10 of them (vs ice cream machines, or rep wheels that are really out of round).
Having an imperfect shell as a blank canvas without hacking a survivor is cool. The possibilities are endless! Safari 240Z, drift missile Bronco or swapping in an electric drivetrain. Don’t represent it as the real deal and it’s all good.
A group buy would be interesting but it’s hard enough with a $100 widget from a US vendor. $8k from overseas is asking nine other folks to trust the importer. That’s…..a tall ask.
Okay, who’s with me for a Datsun 240z Groupon?
Years ago I looked at roof top tents from them they are thousands of dollars cheaper than what they go for here but you have to order like 8-10. I no longer want one as they are a PIA.
There was a show (Music City Trucks?) that did a full Bronco from scratch for SeaFoam and Sema
Still available on YouTube along with most of the older Power Nation catalog.
I think this is a really cool way to keep the legitimate original museum quality vehicles that remain unmodified while allowing enthusiasts to play. It’s like the classic mini or mustang bodies that have been on sale for a while
Do they sell rockers for 1998-2012 Crown Victorias? Asking for a friend
They do.
But you have to buy 5,000 of them at a time.
Who do they think they are? Costco?
I mean, maybe…? They do come with two giant jars of mayonnaise, each of which are substantially bigger than your head.