$10K quarantine project car challenge: Japanese edition

Seems like a good idea to have a project car during this whole quarantine thing. That's why we're debating which Japanese cars under ten grand would make the best one. I'm discussing it with two of the biggest Japanese car connoisseurs at roadshow. John Huang and John Sienkowski. So John, what's your pick? Okay, well, for $10,000, pretty affordable, both. My pick would be an early AP1 Honda S2000. Unfortunately, AP2s have kinda skyrocketed up in value. Just cars in general, just Sq thousand journals have gone up so for 10 grand you're gonna be looking at an AP one s 2000 would probably like 130 to 140,000 miles on it, but being a Honda Those engines as long as they were taken care of, they're pretty much bulletproof. So that era is a two liter engine 9000 RPM redline, which is insane. 240 horsepower, 150 pound feet of torque and it's connected to one of the best manual transmissions that I Can't remember ever driving past 15 or 16 years of me being a professional car journalist and just drink drink chassis, nimble, responsive, and it's a convertible so that'd be my thing. Okay, and you're an sp thousand owner right? Yeah, AP to CR which is a lot more than $10,000 so fancy, how about that you Shawn, what's your what's your pick? I'm gonna keep it in the Honda family and say the Honda Prelude. It's a fun car for under $10,000 and you can easily find a fourth Gen Fifth Gen third Gen Prelude for under $10,000. I mean, you'll probably be looking at mileage around 100,000. Recently it seems that if you want a super clean one, For low miles they're starting to creep past $10,000 wasn't long ago that. Low mileage when you could get easily for like five or six grand, the most popular Prelude by far still seems to be the fifth generation which is the one people most recognized box here. Looks like the square the square headlight one sort of from the early 2000s. It was supposed to kind of mimic the third Gen which had the pop up headlights that I've read. But yeah, most people seem to vote for that one. With that you're getting a 2.2 liter h 22 for cylinder, detectors and every single one and It's not a lot of power but it's enough power to have a lot of fun on whatever roads you want to talk to that Okay. All right. I am also gonna keep it in the Honda family but only because I'm a little obsessive as of late and I'm gonna I'm gonna say the DC Integra. But I'm not gonna say GSR because juicers are kind of expensive and they are beat to death almost universally. So I would say look for an RS or an LS and then k swap it. You're still under 10 grand and you have A superlight natural aspirated car one of the best handling front wheel drive cars ever with a great transmission and engine that makes over 200 horsepower at the wheels and it's under so it's still dead reliable. That's that's where I'm going and and I've spent way too much time on the internet looking at all this stuff. There's spreadsheets on my computer that I'm not prepared to show my life. You know, that kind of thing so. Yeah, as someone who owned an Integra GSR that isn't it that's a good way to look at it. You could probably save some money with drop a swap in there and Still have a really fun car at the end of the day. Yeah, I man you can pickup a clean LS or RS for 2-ish grand maybe 3, and then if you get fancy with your [UNKNOWN] you're looking at 6, 6.5 grand. And then that leaves you some money to upgrade other things like suspension and brakes, and you're good to go. What are people swapping into then, K24s? The real hot swap is the K24 with a K20 head, cuz you get the good VTEC. But even just a basic K20 swap straight out of And RSX Type S is gonna be a little bit cheaper. And that's, you're still gonna 200 plus horsepower to the wheels with a six speed manual and a limited slip def. So it's a pretty compelling package, I think. The main takeaway here is that it's clearly a big win for Team Honda. [LAUGH] So- You know why? Because it's reliability, that's why. There you go, exactly, exactly. There's something in the water at Honda during this period. I think so, I think it was coffee, and a lot of it. That's it for this episode of Road Show's Auto Complete. I've been Kyle Hyatt, you've been But really, just the best. And I'd ask you to not only hit that subscribe and notification buttons, but if you dig what we're doing, please chime in in the comments section and let us know what you'd like us to cover next. [MUSIC]