Automotive porn – Japanese style

What better way to refocus attention on an eight-year-old Mitsuoka Orochi than dress it up in the outrageous psychedelic colours of a popular anime franchise, and then collaborate with a nationwide convenience store chain to sell your finished product?

The zany one-off 'Orochi Evangelion 7-Eleven Ltd' would look at home in an Austin Powers movie, but before we explain what the 'Evangelion' is, some background is in order.

Mitsuoka Motors is primarily regarded as a coachbuilder in Japan, but became the country’s ninth car-maker after it achieved bona-fide manufacturer status in 1994 when it created its own bespoke chassis, which debuted beneath the Caterham-style Zero-1 sports car.

This company’s bread and butter comes from replacing the sheetmetal of cars like the Nissan Micra and Silvia with uniquely designed bodies inspired by British marques such as Jaguar and Rolls-Royce.

The Orochi was the exception. Wanting to build a “supercar that stood out more than a Lamborghini”, company founder Susumu Mitsuoka unveiled the coupe at the 2001 Tokyo motor show.

On sale in small numbers from 2006, the coupe sits on a unique chassis, wears a body inspired by a serpent and employs a 172kW 3.3-litre V6 and five-speed gearbox lifted straight out of a Lexus RX 330.

Fast forward eight years and, to celebrate the end of the Orochi’s production run, Mitsuoka wants to go out with a bang.

And what better way to do it than collaborate with two household names (in Japan at least)? Enter the Evangelion anime TV series and 7-Eleven.

In offering the Orochi Evangelion 7-Eleven Ltd through 7-Eleven stores, Mitsuoka Motors has achieved what no other car-maker has done before: delivered a car that you can order over the counter while buying a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread.

So what’s Evangelion? It’s kind of like a Japanese take on Transformers meets The Terminator. The series is an apocalyptic anime show set in a futuristic Tokyo, 15 years after a worldwide cataclysm.

The main story centers on Shinji, a teenage boy who is recruited by the shadowy organisation NERV to pilot a giant bio-robot called an Evangelion in combat against monstrous beings known as Angels.

Honeycombed with religious and sexual innuendos (yes, this is a kid’s cartoon!), Evangelion is one of the most successful and critically acclaimed anime television series of the 1990s.

The series has become a cultural icon and influenced an artistic and technical revival of the anime industry, as well as being considered both a critique and deconstruction of the mecha/robot genre.

So why not take a coupe that looks like a transformer and paint it in the wild rainbow-like colours of Evangelion? Some might call this automotive porn and, well, we wouldn’t disagree.

When Mitsuoka’s marketing section commissioned Ikuto Yamashita, Evangelion’s robot designer, to come up with a design for the Orochi swansong, he held nothing back. The talented artist used every body bulge, edge and indentation to highlight the greens, purples and oranges that have come to characterise the popular cartoon.

When entries open at 7-Eleven stores in Japan for the one-off Orochi at 10:01am tomorrow (November 14) Mitsuoka is expecting a flurry of interest from the thousands of anime fans inside Japan and throughout Asia -- despite a pricetag of 16 million yen. Entries close on November 30.

If you have a spare $A159,000 to spend on a unique anime-themed coachbuilt coupe, I can pop down to my local 7-Eleven and put your name in the lottery draw that takes place on December 1. I'll grab some Pocari Sweat health drink and Black Black chewing gum while I'm there.