It took some time, but I finally found another useless Japanese car innovation: the quick hand warmer! The Doctor sent me this nice useless innovation. It is a picture from a Japanese X70 brochure he owns.

Useless Japanese car innovation: the quick hand warmer

This quick hand warmer (QHW for short) was an option on the whole Toyota X70 (GX71 and MX70) range and served its purpose to warm the hands of the mid-level salarymen who bought this special option. Probably mostly used when they went golfing with their boss in Autumn...

Basically it is a minified hair dryer stuffed inside the steering column and operated by a switch right behind the air duct:

The quick hand warmer assembly from the EPC
You need a lot of amps going through the wires to bring a 12 volts unit quickly up to temperature, so Toyota installed an amplifier (87760) under the bonnet connected with a big lead to the unit in the steering column. I don't want to know what will happen when this goes wrong with a short circuit or something!

Most of you probably already saw a video posted by white_raven in the comments of last weeks >rare popular bosozoku cars posting

Well this video is actually the first of a set of 3 videos about the Toyota Mark II platform. It starts with three bosozoku styled Mark IIs (RT72, MX31 and GX71), a clean tuned Mark II (JZX90) and finishes with the Verossa JZ110 drift car.

Part one contains last weeks bosozoku styled Corona Mark II RT72 and the first part of a bosozoku styled Mark II MX31:

Good detail is that this RT72 has the 8R engine and not the 8R-G, so it is not the GSS model.

Part two contains the second part of the Mark II MX31, the bosozoku styled Mark II GX71 and the clean tuned JZX90:

Note that the GX71 did get a 7M swap, so actually it became a MX71.
BTW: I love the way the tsurikawa is dangling behind the MX31 at 0:25 and scraping over the highway: the only correct way to make use of a tsurikawa! Anyone got a spare one for me? :D

And part 3 contains Hirota's 2007 JZX110 Verossa drift car:

So a big thanks to white_raven for finding these videos!! :)

Hopefully these videos will stay on Youtube for a while, but I'm afraid they will disappear very soon...

[I posted this article earlier this week on Bosozokustyle.com]