For sale - Isuzu lovers in NZ

While these are rather popular everywhere else in the world, it is rare that you see even one for sale in New Zealand - I should know, I spent 3 years looking for one.
And just when I’ve run out of funds, a whole bunch of them came up in various conditions.

This Bellet is not the famous GTR that was raced many years ago, but it does have that 1960’s modern appeal to it, much like a Triumph Stag or Datsun Fairlady. There is certainly something British about the shape, and the interior looks absolutely beautiful. It looks like it was either stored by a collector, or stored in a museum.

While the exterior has the famous Guigiaro wedge shape (or since it’s Japanese you’d probably think AE86 shape), the part I love most about the Piazza is the interior. Designed to look space-aged with those clusters on either side of the steering wheel and the typical 1980’s centre console that just begs for some synthwave or Springsteen cassettes.
This car is heavily overpriced, but not with drift tax. Rather, movie tax since the owner advertises it as the Back To The Future car. It was designed by the same person who designed the DMC DeLorean, however it isn’t made out of aluminium and doesn’t have the gullwing doors. A few owners have installed Lamborghini swivel doors in a sad attempt to copy the DeLorean.

It is said that Isuzu didn’t pay-off the car magazines who reviewed the Impulse and Piazza, therefore it was given bad reviews. That hindered sales so in the last generation Isuzu called upon tuning company Lotus to work its magic on these cars. All Lotus really did was give it new suspension and a seal-of-approval badge that said Handling By Lotus.

Most underrated car? Isuzu Piazza. Sure, it was a single cam, sure there were no parts available anywhere, it had an air-craft/grandma inspired interior, was from a truck company, and came standard with rust, but Isuzu forgot to pay off the car reviewers so it got bad reviews all over.

The cheapest of the bunch is this example which looks to be damaged and have rust, with almost 300,000Kms on the clock. The owner has heavily taxed this also by calling it a collector’s item. Five years ago, the same price would have gotten you the tidy, low-Km example you see below:

These were sold with a Turbo in Europe as the Isuzu Piazza Turbo, in the U.S as the Isuzu Impulse, and in Australia as the Holden Piazza. You might notice that some have single headlights while others have the brick headlights. I’m not 100% sure, but I think the bricks were reserved for the Impulse but made their way into the Piazza parts bin for the Handling By Lotus models.

While there are a decent number of them for sale, there are a couple Isuzus missing from the list: The 117 which looks like a replica of a Ferrari Dino, and the PA Nero which I can only describe as a really small 4th gen Camaro or Geo Storm coupe.