5 Coachbuilders that Prove Cars Can Wear Halloween Costumes, Too

Halloween has arrived and that means trick or treating, theme parties, and forced fun at the office! No matter how you celebrate, you’re likely to see (or maybe even don) a fun costume. But people aren’t the only ones who can play dress up.

Since the dawn of the automotive era, coachbuilders have crafted bodies for vehicles. In recent years, though, they haven’t just created new sheet metal for new cars, they’ve also copied recreated familiar bodies to graft onto existing vehicles. One need hardly be a car nerd to know that if you see a Lamborghini Countach rolling down the street and it looks a little crooked, it might actually be a Pontiac Fiero in a body kit — or, for our purposes, a costume.

The trend didn’t die with the untimely demise of Pontiac’s mid-engine sports car, though. Like a mummy exiting from the pyramids, these veiled vehicles never really went away. Here are five cars that prove that the trend is still going strong, and that coachbuilders still serve customers at every end of the financial spectrum.

Mistuoka

Mitsuoka is likely the most famous coachbuilder currently plying its trade. The Japanese company takes humdrum modern vehicles and offers to dress them up in the costume of a classic. For example, the Buddy starts life as a Toyota RAV4, but is equipped with a new front and rear clip and steel wheels to make it look like a Chevrolet Blazer from the ’70s. And the efffect is really fun! If old SUVs aren't to your tastes, you may be interested in the Rock Star, a Mazda MX-5 that got all dressed up as a second-generation Chevrolet Corvette. I don’t know about you, but I’d give this car a treat if it knocked on my door tonight.

Good Wood Park

Mitsuoka isn’t the only Japanese company crafting costumes for contemporary cars. Good Wood Park is another, though it focuses exclusively on the Nissan Micra and it sells just two costumes. The resulting vehicles are called the Ministar and the Herbie. As you might have guessed, the latter is designed to look (vaguely) like a vintage Volkswagen Beetle but the former, the Ministar, is a modern take on the Austin A30/A35. While that name may not mean much to our younger readers, the car is perhaps best known for being driven by Wallace and Gromit, of Wallace and Gromit fame.

David Brown Automotive

To be honest, most modern coachbuilers aren't focused on cars for the masses. Take the David Brown Automotive Speedback, which starts life as a Jaguar XKR before slipping into a costume designed to make it look like a vintage Aston Martin DB5/DB6. As a result, the deeply British vehicle is powered by a supercharged 5.0L V8 engine that makes 503 hp and can propel drivers up to 100 km/h in just 4.8 seconds. Sean Connery’s James Bond could have only dreamed of such acceleration figures in his DB5, which needed more than eight seconds to reach the same speeds.

Saoutchik 300 GTC

The Brits aren’t the only ones whose vintage vehicles are being reimagined for the modern era. Over in France, the Saoutchik coachbuilding house was revived in 2024 after more than 70 years away. In its day, the company created vehicle bodies for some of the finest brands of the era, like Bentleys and Bugattis. Today, the brand only has one vehicle, the 300 GTC. Made of carbon fibre, this costume turns the modern Mercedes-AMG SL63 into a 1957 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL. Power comes from Mercedes’ modern 577-hp twin-turbo V8 and the light bodywork helps cut weight as compared to the standard SL63, resulting in some deeply modern performance metrics

Trans Am Worldwide

Americans can get in on the fun, too! The loss of the Pontiac brand following the Great Recession was a blow to fans of American cars everywhere, but Florida’s Trans Am Worldwide kept the flame alive in the 2010s with its modern take on the Pontiac Trans Am that was based on the Chevrolet Camaro. Such was the quality of the “car costume” that even the Bandit himself, Burt Reynolds, signed a few examples. These days, the coachbuilder has turned its attentions away from Pontiac, and back towards Chevrolet, transforming Camaros into a modern take on the 1970 Chevelle.

Just like a Halloween costume, not all of these coachbuilt vehicles are perfect copies of their source material, but all prove that the fun of transformation goes well beyond the human realm and into the automotive.