Cars Of A Certain Age // If It's At Least 25 Years Old, That Ingot Of Unobtanium Can Now Be Yours.//

Forbidden love is every hack playwright’s go-to theme for a reason.

- John Pearley Huffman

Distant and unobtainable are more intriguing than nearby and easily accessed. So naturally, the best cars must be those that never came to the U.S.—the stuffthe feds wouldn’t allow the Japanese, Germans, Italians, Koreans, Britons, Aussies, Chinese, and whomever elses to sell to us.

But while you can’t bring in just any car from a foreign country, you can import a car if it is 25 years old or older. That’s been true since the 1988 passage of the Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act. For most of the last 31 years, however, it hasn’t mattered all that much. What noncertified 1975 vehicle was going to get anyone’s pulse racing in the year 2000? Maybe a factory-spec Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer or the Lamborghini Countach, but that era’s not-for-America machinery is otherwise mostly awful.

Today, the 25-year reach starts with 1994, a fertile year for performance machinery around the world. In Japan, the Nissan Skyline GT-R was in the last year of its R32 generation. In Germany, AMG was getting huge and the “M” at BMW still meant “motorsport.” In England, McLaren was turning out a weird thing called the F1.

A generation grew up on these untouchable cars. C/D and long-gone mags like Turbo and Sport Compact Car celebrated exotic machines such as the Nissan Silvia 270R. Then readers would talk about them in chatrooms on dial-up AOL or Compu Serve. These cars represent the time when our obsessions matured into lifelong passions, and vice versa.