Does anyone actually own one of these or was it a one off?
It was planned for production but, as far as I know, only the blue prototype was ever completed. The rights were then sold off to ASL, who rebadged it as the ASL RS01. This also failed to make it into production. Interestingly, rights to the original ZZ (small, affordable, Elise-type car) were sold off to Halfords/Autobacs, who developed it as the Autobacs Garaiya RS-01, another failed project. Seems that Kaira makes money by building prototypes, hyping the cars, and then selling off the production rights. BTW, I have no idea why both of these cars were going to be called the RS01 (RS-01).
I read this thread last month but didn't have much to add. I too was long ago left wondering what ever happened to this great design, and appreciated reading your comments Wayne even if they were a disappointment. Tomita Yoshikazu - the man behind Tommy Kaira - has a blog that I discovered for the first time today. I think you'll enjoy looking at the pictures from the posts I will link to which are specific to the ZZII. You might even enjoy popping each link into Google Translator - it won't give you an exact translation, but you can certainly get the gist of things from what he writes about the car. I have always loved the design of this car, but there are so few images in circulation of it. I'm really just blown away by all the photos presented here - nearly 40 that I've never seen before. I only wish that they were larger, but as is typical on most Japanese websites they don't post much high resolution content. I'll post his blog entries from oldest to newest where they contain ZZII images. Some of the photos may be repeated on a few pages, but I figure if he shared an image of the car he probably included some relevant comments each time in case anyone does intend to try and read them. http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/05/post-a793.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/06/post-5462.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/06/post-46b4.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/07/post-ae66.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/07/post-9800.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/07/post-45b2.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/07/post-c1e3.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/09/post-6839.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/11/post-6d7b.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2009/12/post-0e6e.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2010/02/post-086c.html http://ajp.cocolog-nifty.com/tommyzz/2010/03/post-2160.html If you have a lot of time, I'd even suggest going page-by-page for each month of his blog from the beginning as there's quite a bit of good historic content in the photos from the other pages that I really enjoyed seeing. You can start at the first entry with this link, and then click to each following month's content using the link at the far right on the bottom of each page. >8^) ER Image Unavailable, Please Login
Thanks Erik. I'm going to have to remember to at least skim through the blog. I remember playing Gran Turismo and always wondering about this car.
