Alibaba Will Sell You A Brand New Toyota AE86 Chassis, How Dumb An Idea Is It To Buy One?

Anyone who has ever restored an old car knows that many of their problems would be solved by starting with a fresh chassis rather than dealing with the rust, road grime, and gunk that has built up over the decades. We all wish we could start over with a clean slate, right? Building from a body-in-white would be significantly easier than starting with a beat up donor chassis, so when a Chinese concern announced it would be selling complete fresh reproduction chassis of Toyota’s iconic AE86 Corolla, we were naturally quite excited. 

In order to find out if these Alibaba chassis were any good, the boys at BigTime bought one, as well as a thrashed AE86 donor chassis. Their idea was to attempt to fit all of the parts from a ragged example into the new chassis to see how good, or indeed bad, it might be. It definitely didn’t go as smoothly as they had hoped it would, with some stuff not looking very good at the outset. 

“Keep in mind this is the first one of these,” says BigTime mechanic Mike Day. “So there’s gonna be some things that don’t fit great, and they’re still dialing in the tooling, but there’s a lot of really bad stuff on this thing. Everything’s crooked, this weld is not completed and cracked, if you look at it from the front this [passenger] A-pillar is an inch and a half lower than that [driver] side.”

In the build process the BigTime crew definitely found a few things that would give a Toyota engineer some pause; bad welds, a few shortcuts, mismatched holes, poor fitment, missing hardware, and mis-drilled components. Like Mike said, this was the first chassis, so maybe subsequent examples will be better than this, but do you really want to spend ten grand plus import duties to find out? 

Despite the chassis not being quite square and some of the hardware holes being in entirely the wrong place, the car did ultimately come together with some finagling. Quite a few rivnuts were added, a few holes were enlarged or moved, and the dash bar is under some pretty serious tension, but within the course of this episode the BigTime guys got the car moving under its own power, and even ripping a quick J-turn for the hell of it. 

Now that they have a complete and running AE86 chassis, built from the ground up within just a couple long days of work, what on earth can they do with it? This kind of Chinese chassis, as you can imagine, don’t come with a VIN tag, and certainly can’t be made road legal or registerable without committing some light fraud. If you want a track-only AE86 or a fresh drift car, however, maybe this is the move. Obviously if you’re going to end up stitch-welding the panels and building a roll cage anyway, it doesn’t really matter if the folks in China did a bang up job of metal glue. 

We’ll have to wait and see how this project progresses for them in future episodes, and how they end up taking advantage of a clean and rust-free shell. It still needs quite a lot of things added to make it a fully functioning car, like an interior and window glass. That said, it’s a very neat project, and I look forward to seeing it complete. It’s already quite rowdy, and knowing these fellas, they’re going to make it rowdier. 

With a hot rotary engine going into the donor car, maybe something like a 3S-GTE engine would be more fitting for this thing. I’d like to see one car as a drifter and one as a grip-focused track car. Whatever they do, it won’t be boring.