The Autech Zagato Stelvio AZ1 Is an Absolutely Bizarre 1980s Creation

this this is a 1989 autec zagato stelvio az1 and it's weird you probably already realized that in fact you're probably thinking what is otech what is a zegato stelvio what is this thing and why does it look like this good questions all today i am going to review this car and i'll explain everything before i get started a quick note about cars and bids my enthusiast car auction website for cool cars from the modern era we recently sold an autec zegato stelvio az1 on cars and bids and it was purchased by the same person who owns this one so yes that means he has two now he shipped the one he bought on cars and bids to a different residence so i am reviewing this one but this is exactly the kind of weird quirky and cool car that cars and bids is becoming known for so if you're looking to sell your special interesting modern car check out cars and bids you will get the most interest and the most bids and money for your cool car and if you're looking to buy a cool car from the 1980s and up cars and bids has daily auctions and amazing selection at carsandbids.com so let's talk autec zagato stelvio az1 this car is owned by myron vernis who's become sort of famous on instagram and elsewhere for his interesting collection of weird and special and quirky cars you can follow him on instagram with the link in the description below and if you're into weird cars you have to know about this one because frankly this is peak weird now the az-1 was based on the nissan leopard which was a coupe that was sold here in north america as an infinity but the engine was tuned by nissan tuner autec and the interior and exterior were created by famous italian design house zegato and they made it weird very weird and it was expensive these were only sold in japan back in 1989 this car cost 180 thousand dollars in 1989 money which is equivalent to like 300 000 today an unbelievable amount of money to spend and at that price point it's no surprise that they only made about a hundred of these for the entire world they're incredibly rare but thankfully i have tracked down this one thanks to myron and today i'm going to review it first i'll take you on a tour of this car and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then i'll get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a doug score all right time for the quirks and features of the autec zagato stelvio az1 and i'm going to start out here with actually the keychain look at this otech on one side zegato on the other side this is unbelievable they made fewer than a hundred of these cars and it's not like otec and zegato got together for any other cars there was only one more and it was even rarer than this one but there is a purpose-made keychain for this vehicle i cannot believe i am saying this that might be the rarest thing of all here and by the way i want to talk production numbers for a second if you google this car online you will find sources that say they built 104 and other sources that said they built 88 the actual total isn't known the original plan was to make 200 of these cars but they didn't get that far these all have a plaque inside that gives which number each one is and nobody has seen a plaque higher than 87 so they're thinking around that is the total production for these cars this one has plaque number 81 as you can see in the interior but we are getting ahead of ourselves here because if you want to talk quirks and features of this car you got to start with the exterior design which is truly bizarre absolutely weird and crazy and strange and insane now like i said the exterior was designed by zagato which is sort of a famous italian design house and frankly they're kind of famous for making some strange interesting sort of weird quirky designs and this car certainly qualifies in this time period they were also making zegato aston martin models which as you can see also have kind of a strange look them not the traditional beautiful clean flowy aston martin design and they made the alfa romeo r z and s z which were also famous for simply being weird so this car was frankly right up the zegato alley and boy is it strange now this car has a bunch of weird design traits and quirks and i'm going to cover all of them but by far the most obvious is the mirrors they are not in the normal place sort of at the base of the front window instead they are here on the hood under these little cubbies looks almost like eyelids or ears sticking out from the hood you have the mirrors absolutely bizarre now throughout the 1960s 70s 80s japanese cars did have their mirrors mounted on the front fenders on the sides by the time this car came out that was largely done but i think that the intent here was to kind of pay tribute to the old-school japanese cars that used to have their mirrors mounted in this spot and it's supposed to be like a modern take on the old japanese mirror mounting location instead it comes off as absolutely strange one of the most bizarre design details in any car ever i truly mean that now interestingly in these little cubbies you had sort of a normal looking mirror just like a regular rectangle but the cubbies weren't rectangular and so around the mirror you have these weird like vent looking things that look almost like streaks that are just there to kind of fill the rest of the space because otherwise it would look even weirder as if that's somehow possible but like i said the mirrors are far from the only weird design trait on this car zegato of this era was known for weird and they certainly delivered with this vehicle another strange one is the wheels which you can see they have no spokes they're just sort of a solid silver piece no traditional spokes like every other wheel but there is a duct in these wheels like a nacca duct which looks like it's intended to bring air into the wheels and into the brakes i asked the owner about this duct and he sort of jokingly said he thinks they installed it just to spark arguments among engineers some of the engineers he's spoken to have said yeah it brings air into the brakes it's brilliant others have said no it has no purpose at all it's ridiculous whether or not it actually is functional i guess we'll never know but that is the only interruption in the otherwise solid wheel very strange and the weird design choices continue around the back where you have this little line here that comes sort of from the top in back then down a little bit on the side and then goes down the side of the car now that's not that unusual of a line for cars that have wrap around tail lights in back but this one doesn't have wrap around tail lights it just has this sort of random line that comes down and then it creates extra space back here that they have to fill with another fake vent because otherwise it would just look even weirder than it already does again a very odd design choice on the outside but anyway next up another weird quirk outside even though this line sort of simulates where the taillights could be where they actually are is down here in this horizontal light bar that goes across the entire rear end of the car and if you look inside this light bar you can see on each side a brake light a turn signal and a reverse light all the exact same size three on each side which of course makes sense interestingly the light bar is tinted which of course diminishes the effectiveness of the brake light the reverse light and the turn signal but it's intended to make the rear end i guess look a little bit better and a little bit smoother i guess and in fact they've done a few things to try to make the rear end look smoother without interruptions like most normal cars have for instance there's no keyhole back here you can't actually access the trunk from the rear of the car there's no way to get in back here because they didn't want to have an ugly keyhole just sticking out you also don't have badging back here there's no autek zagato badge in the back there's no badge at all except it says stelvio back here which is the model name that is the only rear badge on this car you got it behind one of these in traffic you would be quite confused i promise you that and by the way another interesting exterior item worth noting is the color it looks like dark blue at first glance but it's actually one of those color shifting colors that looks different depending on what light you're in it can look blue or purple or even green difficult to see today because we don't have direct sunlight but if i shine my phone flashlight you can see the green flakes and it really does look green in bright light it's sort of like ford's chroma flare paint that they put on those mustang cobras for a little while not quite as intense as that which you can see shifting color a little bit more but it is still a pretty cool color only two of these were made in this color and this is one of the two and next up we move up front with the botek zagato stelvio a couple of interesting things up here for one of the headlights these headlights are shared with the nissan sylvia from this era the s13 sylvia which is a car that has a pretty big following of its own i bet most sylvia owners don't realize that their headlights are also in this bizarre thing now another interesting thing up here is the front badge which you can see says otec zegato and they've even created a little logo for this partnership with an a and then of course the zagato z right in the center and very visible now obviously zegato like i said created the body design the car autec was a tuning arm within nissan that was intended to bring nissan models even more power and performance and so that's where autec comes from pair it with zagato and you have the az1 this car and next we move under the hood in this car which isn't actually that easy of a task you pop the hood in the normal way a little latch in the driver's foot well but then opening it is actually kind of a challenge because it is tremendously heavy because it includes the side mirrors and all this extra bodywork so lifting up the hood is actually probably one of the heaviest hoods i have ever lifted up but once it's up then you can see the powertrain now this is a turbocharged 6-cylinder with about 320 horsepower which was a pretty healthy figure for the time especially in japan in the late 80s not too many powerful cars but you had this one now you can see on the engine it says nissan off to the side but it also says tuned by autec on the top just to remind you this isn't one of your usual nissan engines it's been tuned by autec which like i said was a tuning arm of nissan designed to extract a little more power and performance from its engines by the way one other interesting hood detail you can see with the hood up there are like little covers plastic covers over where the headlights would be now this is especially unusual because the headlights themselves have covers on them already like i said they're just the headlights from the s13 sylvia so they have a cover and then the hood has another cover that goes over the top of them i guess this was to make the headlights work better with this design or at least so thought zagato but anyway next we climb inside the zegato stelvio but as you might imagine just getting in this car is kind of quirky with the door handle on the outside which operates like the door handle in a mercedes 300sl go wing you push this little silver button it pops out the door handle then you pull it and open up the door kind of an aspirational door handle in this car now when you climb in this interior you're probably pretty impressed if you've spent time in other late 1980s japanese cars which were more about practicality than beauty zagato did the interior of this car as well as the exterior and everything in here is classier than it would be if it had been just a regular nissan model everything's a little bit nicer a little bit more luxurious to go along with the zegato name and the zagato price tag now one thing you'll notice is i am sitting over here on the right side of the car like i mentioned earlier these were all sold in japan japanese market only and so all of the autec zagato stelvios are right-hand drive cars since the japanese market drives on the right side and to be honest these are mostly all still in japan with a few limited exceptions like i said cars and bids sold one of these to the current owner of this car but he shipped it to a property that he owns in another country so that one is no longer in the united states in fact he thinks that this might be the only one here in the united states so you're not going to see a lot of oteca zagatos stelvio az ones driving around even if you're in japan of course incredibly rare but that was the market they were destined for but anyway back to the interior in this car and like i said classier than a normal japanese car interior from this time everything in here is leather the dashboard the door panels the seats everything or at least alcantara and you can see on the door panel that the door pull is finished in this alcantara it's wearing a little bit but they wanted you to pull the door closed not by touching metal or cheap plastic but instead this lovely soft alcantara surface they've even put this fuzzy little pad on the interior door latch now to me this looks like some cheap thing you'd buy to stick on the bottom of furniture so it doesn't scratch your floor but here it is in order to make opening the door a slightly more classy experience than just touching ugly cheap plastic now worth noting also on the door panel you have your power mirror controls here and yes they do work you can control those crazy power mirrors on the hood by using the power mirror control here in the door panel just as if they were normal mirrors which they are not you also have a speaker on the door panel and you can see it says zegato on the speaker rather than like a stereo company zegato really wanted to get their name in this car and make sure you knew that it was special same deal on the steering wheel you can see right in the center it says zagato design not autec nissan stelvio zagato because that was the most special part about this car now i must say as classy as zegato tried to make this interior it is kind of an interesting mix of regular nissan stuff and zegato classiness for instance you have sort of regular nissan switch gear in the center control stack for the climate controls and some other buttons in here you also have a relatively standard nissan gear lever in here automatic transmission lever that was in a lot of nissan models in the late 80s and early 90s doesn't really look all that different from other nissans and by the way all of these were automatic transmission i think they thought that it classed up the car it was a zegato italian influence classy luxury vehicle and so it should have an automatic and so they all do but anyway despite the nissan switch gear in here you do have some beautiful zegato upgrades to improve things like i said leather everywhere but it goes further than that you have a little panel over on the dashboard on the passenger side with wood that says stelvio on it reminding you how special your car is you also have gauges that are distinctive from regular nissan gauges these are zagato designed and they certainly look different and more exciting and the reason zagato was able to make all these changes is because they built this car nissan would send them chassis and powertrains from the leopard the nissan leopard which this car was based on and then zagato would put on the body and do the interior in italy and then send everything back to japan where the cars were actually sold so this car not only designed by zagato inside and out but mostly assembled by them too but anyway some other interesting quirks in this interior for one thing the wiper stock is kind of unusual in order to adjust the speed of the wipers you twist the end of the wiper stock and then this little blue line sort of retracts or extends based on how much you're twisting and that increases or decreases the speed of the wipers very odd way to do that but that's how it was done in nissan models from this era also unusual in this car is the power locks this car has power locks they're operated with a little button in the center except it doesn't say lock and unlock it says on and off you want to unlock the car you press off then they're not locked anymore you've turned the locks off or you can also turn the locks on if you want to as well kind of odd two other interesting controls in here in the center control stack for when you have a little button marked sports with an image of a steering wheel on it you press that and it's supposed to tighten up the steering and i can confirm it actually does work drove the car a little bit earlier you press that and it really does feel a little bit tighter and more responsive so kind of an early adjustable steering setting in this car you also have the fuel door button there kind of a strange location for it right in the front and center of the interior but you press that and then the fuel door pops open on the outside of the car kind of strange placement and next up we move on to the back of the autec zegato stelvio this car does have back seats although they're pretty small as you might imagine getting into them is a little bit difficult first you have to move the front seat all the way forward which can only be done the electronic seat adjustment so you're waiting a little bit of a waze but once you've got it all the way forward you can then pull on this little pull cord back here and the seat back goes forward and then you can climb in back which of course i will do although it is quite challenging oh to get back here now once you're in back you quickly discover there isn't really anything interesting or quirky back here except the speakers in back say bows on them remember the speakers up front said zigato but i guess they felt it wasn't as important to inform your rear passengers that you're in a zagato they could make do with just knowing the name of the speaker company and next up we move on to the trunk in the stelvio the cargo area now like i mentioned there's no like keyhole back here to get into the trunk you don't even have like a little popper trunk release thing instead the only way to get into the trunk in this car is a little switch in the driver's area up front you flip the switch and it pops the trunk open and then it puts it in this position and you can open it up which is a little inconvenient if you want to walk up to the car and put some luggage in it you have to walk into the interior undo it with the switch and then you can come back here when you get back here you'll find the trunk is really not all that big surprisingly small actually for sort of a grand touring type car with four seats and the spare tire takes up a pretty good amount of what little room there is surprisingly small trunk in here but i will note you do have a beautiful tool kit in this trunk it's leather bound and there's even like saddle leather in the middle with some beautiful snaps and it says otec zegato on it there are not too many autec zegato tool kits that you will find but this car has one and in fact this car even has its original owner's manual which is also autec zegato specific to this car very cool and surprisingly about half of this owner's manual is in english japanese of course for half english for the other half which really is kind of a shock since this car was never intended really to be sold outside of japan very interesting to see this owner's manual and there are even some drawings showing this car you can see right here here is the zagato stelvio pictured in its owner's manual not too many of these manuals not too many of these drawings but pretty cool to see and so those are the quirks and features of the autec zegato stelvio az1 now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right time to drive the autec zagatos stelvio az1 i'll tell you i've spent a lot of time driving this car around and the first thing that i've realized the first big surprise it's actually pretty good to drive which i wasn't really expecting given how it looks but before i get to the drive i want to put this car in a little context when it came out and why it was built in the first place so back in the late 80s japan was experiencing a crazy economic boom that turned out to be a bubble and this is a period is now actually referred to as the bubble economy in japan but everything was expensive and they were coming out with all sorts of crazy stuff including a nissan paired with zagato that cost the equivalent of three hundred thousand dollars it made sense at the time given the context of the economy and frankly it might sound familiar today but anyway it's also not too crazy to imagine spending that kind of money for his purpose-built special you know limited production zagato car zegato recently did a run of limited edition aston martin's that cost a million dollars or at least that was their sticker price didn't really sell for that but the point is you know a limited production car from zagato they tend to bring big money and so you know it made some sense at the time to sell this for big money but anyway i want to talk driving experience because i am perplexed by the fact that this car actually drives well which i wasn't really expecting okay first off acceleration 320 horsepower is nothing to scoff at so i should have expected that it would be quick um but i don't know you look at this car and you're just so enamored by how bizarre it is you don't think that it could possibly be like a good performance car but you floor it and it moves i mean this is a fast car it feels fast even by modern standards and i wonder what it would have felt like if it had had the stick shift instead of this automatic which is kind of a shame it sort of dulls the performance in this car but it's not just that that i like about the car it actually handles pretty well too which is a bit of a surprise the odometer is currently showing 48 000 i'm sure that's kilometers 25 000 miles the car hasn't had much time to wear and indeed it feels not very worn suspension seems like pretty tight and pretty well put together it seems surprisingly nice to steer to turn to drive you get good steering feedback uh less vague than a lot of the other japanese sports cars i've driven from this era it actually drives reasonably well and frankly another benefit of this car is it's pretty comfortable and pretty easy to drive you know unlike a lot of like very limited production you know italian design special cars this is it's practical i mean i can sit in here normally obviously it's not some like low slung exotic supercar it's reasonably acceptable to sit in now the reason for that is it doesn't look as good let's just put it out there it doesn't look as good as a lot of low slung low production number italian super cars like this is this car looks weird it looks strange and that's both a selling point and a drawback i think that alone is the main reason that these have stayed relatively cheap but it also sort of fits with zagato's theme from the time they were building aston martin's that looked really weird they were building a few the alfa romeo sz and rz very weird looking cars now i want to interrupt for a second talk about the mirrors uh which are obviously one of the most unique design elements of the car um they actually work pretty well especially the one over on the driver's side fender i can see i can see out of it i can see exactly what i want to it's a little trippy at first not to look in the normal place for a mirror but when you see where it is it works okay the other one is a little bit of an issue though for my seating position a portion of it is cut off by the dashboard it's a little far away that mirror to me not quite as ideal but they work they it still works and both of them work better than you'd think overall my feeling of this car um it doesn't drive all that badly so the 300 zx had the twin turbo versions motor this is the single turbo version it doesn't drive like a 300 zx it's not quite as sporty it doesn't quite handle as well it's not quite as fast but it's not far behind and given the price point of this car i think it's a total bargain to get a ultra rare zegato designed and built car with decent power and performance uh for 25 30 40 000 to me that's a steal um but it's also weird and not the most attractive car and it's based on a nissan instead of some cool italian card so maybe these never go up really all that much in value but i don't know i think it's a pretty cool vehicle and i've always wanted to check it out at least since i've known about it over the last few years and i'm thrilled i had the chance and so that's the otech zagato stelvio az1 what a bizarre vehicle and frankly i can't imagine ever paying 300 000 the equivalent for this but i'm equally surprised that the one we had on cars and bids sold for only 25 000 ultimately it's an extremely limited production car done by zagato who's made some iconic designs these are a bargain frankly if you can find one and that's not easy anyway now it's time to give the stelvio zagato az1 a doug score and the dug score is here 46 out of 100 which places it here against some other cars i've reviewed from this era that are sort of similar i guess truthfully though the autek stelvio zagato is kind of on its own it's rarer than anything else on this list and it's weirder than anything on this list but it drives pretty well and it's quite special when you consider the history and the zagato influence i liked this car more than i expected and i'm thrilled i had the chance to check it out considering just how absolutely bizarre it is i always love the weird stuff [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 715,445

Keywords: autech stelvio, zagato, zagato review, doug demuro, demuro, doug de muro

Id: 3lwHeFJRIsI

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/pryan886]

$180k in Japan in 1989! Who bought these?!?!

This would have launched right as the asset price bubble began to collapse. I bet a lot of these got liquidated by their owners within a couple years of purchase.

[u/WhiteCollarMetalHead]

Should the wheels be on the opposite side of the car they are for the NACA duct to function properly?

[u/Philo_T_Farnsworth]

This is my favorite kind of Doug review. I know /u/doug-demuro doesn't hang around here much anymore but I just wanna say, it brings me joy to watch Doug's enthusiasm for this weird and quirky car that I'd literally never even heard about before today. I feel like the world needs a historian of weirdo cars and it has given us Doug DeMuro.

[u/Dangerous_Concept341]

Those wheels lmao

[u/wtfthisisntreddit]

I was confused as to how this car had s13 Silvia headlights.. until the hood came up.

[u/Bradymyhero]

Now this is the type of Doug content I like to see.

[u/biggsteve81]

What kind of drugs were the designers at Zagato on in the late 80s?

[u/rekniht01]

I actually think this would be a nice looking 80's car without the mirror and headlight covers.

[u/tokhar]

That enormous clamshell really annoys me for some reason. It just makes the front end look a lot bigger than it really is. I wouldn’t mind those Mirrors, just how they’re buried in that clamshell.