AUTECH’s TSUNAGU Project Uses Two Rare Stelvios to Preserve More Than Cars
One Autech Zagato Stelvio will help save another, but the real goal is passing decades of hands-on knowledge to a new generation.
Some heritage programs preserve cars. AUTECH’s latest project is trying to preserve the people and skills required to keep cars like them alive.
Nissan Motorsports & Customizing announced the Stelvio “TSUNAGU Project” on September 17, marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of Autech Japan. The project brings together two rare Autech Zagato Stelvios and, more importantly, two generations of NMC employees.
Experienced engineers and technicians who have spent years developing and maintaining vehicles will work alongside younger employees, using an actual Stelvio as their classroom. The goal is to transfer the sort of knowledge that doesn’t always fit neatly into a service manual: technique, judgment, problem-solving and the philosophy behind building unusual cars in the first place.
Two Stelvios, two very different histories
At the center of TSUNAGU are a red Stelvio and a blue Stelvio.
The red car has been maintained by NMC for many years and represents AUTECH’s earlier history. The blue car has a considerably more complicated story: it became inoperable following the Great East Japan Earthquake, but its owner continued to preserve it before eventually entrusting the car to NMC with the hope that it could be useful for the future.
Now, parts from the red Stelvio will be used as work progresses on the blue car.
That makes this more interesting than an ordinary corporate restoration exercise. Rather than placing two historically significant cars under covers and calling the job done, NMC is using them as working objects through which knowledge can be passed from one set of hands to another.
The name TSUNAGU roughly carries the idea of connecting or linking, and NMC says it represents several connections at once: one car to another, one generation of workers to the next, and AUTECH’s past to its future.
Why the Stelvio?
There are certainly easier cars AUTECH could have chosen.
The Autech Zagato Stelvio arrived in 1989, only three years after Autech Japan was established. Developed jointly with Italian coachbuilder Zagato, it combined bespoke exterior and interior design with dedicated engine and chassis tuning. Production was limited to 200 cars.
And subtle, it was not.
More than three decades later, the Stelvio remains one of the strangest and most recognizable products associated with AUTECH: part Japanese engineering exercise, part Italian coachbuilt grand tourer and very much a product of its era.
For the young Autech Japan, however, it represented something bigger. The company describes the Stelvio as one of its early symbolic challenges—a project that combined Japanese engineering with Italian craftsmanship while deliberately ignoring some of the conventions of ordinary production-car design.
That makes it a particularly appropriate teaching tool.
Anyone can study modern manufacturing processes. Working on a low-production specialty vehicle from 1989 forces technicians to deal with aging components, limited replacement parts, unusual construction and the realities of preserving something that was never common to begin with.
Those are precisely the circumstances in which experience becomes difficult to replace.
From red to blue
NMC has also given the project a second theme: “FROM RED TO BLUE.”
The colors carry some company history of their own.
Red was the corporate color of the former Autech Japan and is represented by the red Stelvio. Today, AUTECH continues not as a separate company name but as an NMC brand whose identity is associated with blue. The two cars therefore represent both ends of a timeline—the early Autech organization and the present-day AUTECH brand.
There’s also a more human connection between them.
One car was preserved by the company. The other survived because an owner cared enough to keep it after a natural disaster and eventually entrusted it to the people who could give it another purpose.
Now the first car is helping the second move forward.
Preserving the knowledge behind the cars
The automotive world spends plenty of time talking about preserving historically significant vehicles. What receives less attention is preserving the practical knowledge necessary to repair, restore and understand them.
That knowledge can disappear surprisingly quickly.
A technician retires. A fabrication technique stops being used. A peculiar adjustment that everybody in a workshop once understood becomes an unexplained note in an old document—if it was documented at all.
TSUNAGU takes a different approach by putting experienced and younger employees around the same physical car and having them perform the work together.
NMC President and CEO Hiroshi Sanada said the company sees AUTECH’s heritage as extending beyond cars and technology to include the knowledge, skills, passion and willingness to challenge convention that produced them in the first place.
For enthusiasts, that may ultimately be the most valuable part of the project.
The Stelvio is rare enough that very few people will ever own one. But the problem TSUNAGU is addressing is universal across the enthusiast-car world: keeping the knowledge alive can be every bit as important as keeping the machine alive.
NMC says it plans to share updates on the Stelvio work through its official social-media channels as the project progresses.
And for once, “heritage” means something more interesting than another anniversary badge.
Source: Nissan Motorsports & Customizing, September 17, 2026.
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