UR TV CAST

SPECIFICATIONS Price: £13,880-£20,830; Engine: 1.9 litre, four-cylinder diesel, 99bhp; Performance: 110mph, 0-60 in 14 secs, 47 mpg; Co2: 162 g/km; Worth considering: Ford Focus C-Max, Fiat Multipla, Renault Megane Grand Scenic, Vauxhall Zafira.
With Christmas looming, as usual my thoughts turn to grand larceny. I have been contemplating a bank job for some time now because my TV is on the blink and my wife has begun to tire of the Balinese shadow puppet shows I have been staging to distract her.What is more, my son has reached the age where the old joke about children getting as much fun from the packaging as the toy no longer applies, though I gain some comfort from the money we have saved all these years by giving him colourfully wrapped boxes. Mitsuoka will build this car for production, and if nothing else, it does make an alternative to Honda’s NSX.We shall not be seeing any of these mad Mitsuokas in the UK under any official umbrella, although all have the right-hand drive that Japan shares with us. The company’s exports are thus far limited to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Bahrain and Brunei. When I asked export manager Mr Ishihara why we could not have the cars in Europe, he cited our strict crash-test and other constructional standards and the huge cost in subjecting the cars to destruction tests.Too bad.

Taking your Viewt to your local Jaguar dealer for its annual service would have been a fine piece of candid camera.. What can it all mean?The Orochi, curvy as a Gerald Scarfe cartoon and menacing in black, is almost handsome. But the designers just could not leave the mid-engined, 3.3-litre Toyota V6-powered Orochi alone. The bonnet has eight stomata and the nose has a tiny, daft oval grille, the whole visual assemblage “evocative of a snake transfixing its prey with a stare”. And here lies part of the point: Mitsuoka does what it does because the Japanese are besotted with old British cars, especially those from the constituent parts of the former British Leyland.I once saw a Tokyo emporium full of old Minis called Alec British, and if you have ever wondered where all the old BMC 1100s went, Japan is the repository. Vanden Plas, MG and 1300GT versions are especially prized.So, classic British looks (or a loose interpretation thereof), melded with Japanese reliability and a questionable irony content; no wonder those owners viewed their Viewts as beloved.But the show revealed another, fiercer dimension to Mitsuoka’s grand plan.

Meet the Orochi supercar, teed up in the company’s wonderfully picturesquely-written brochure as “The pleasures of anxiety The temptation of instinct”. As an original design rather than a remake, the Zero-1 enabled Mitsuoka to become, officially, a car maker.Next came a return to the company’s roots, with the 50cc Micro Car Series. These could be bought as a kit, and at Tokyo Mitsuoka showed a retro version, Convoy 88, whose corrugated flanks held a hint of France’s favourite retro commercial, the Citro?H van. Other delights since then have included the Ryoga (think Jag/Bentley fusion with extra headlights), the Ray (based on a Daihatsu Cuore but bearing the face of a 1960s Mini-based Wolseley Hornet) and the Yuga (a kind of shrunken old-type FX4 London Taxi).Which leads to a strange irony.

The Zero-1, with a Matsuda engine, was a basic fun car along the lines of a Caterham Seven but smaller and plumper, and at Tokyo this year Mitsuoka showed a successor model. Mitsuoka is the official Japanese importer for the present TX1 taxi, itself a vehicle which looks a little like a giant Micra, apart from its own retro front. And what does it look like in the rear-view mirror? Nothing less than a Bentley S2 from 1959, with a kind of mock-Bentley humped rump to match. Pity, then, that the interior does not match those lofty external ideals, pieces of wood (real, to be fair) being the main not-a-Nissan feature. Plus the cocktail cabinets, of course.So who are these Mitsuoka people? They started in 1982 with the Bubu Shuttle 50, an invalid carriage, and five years later Mitsuoka built its first replica-car based on the pre-war Mercedes-Benz SSK. A Porsche 356 Speedster replica followed, and a faintly ridiculous pseudo-1930s American roadster called Le-Seyde, which is still in production.