GT-R

Make
Nissan
Segment
Coupe

The R34 Skyline GT-R, the predecessor to the current 2020 Nissan GT-R, is one of the most iconic cars to ever come out of Japan. We can't see why anyone would want to mess with such a legendary formula but that's exactly what Instagram rending artist Khyzyl Saleem has done. With inspiration from a popular YouTube series, Saleem has envisioned what the R34 GT-R would look like with pop-up headlights.

Just looking at the rendering, replacing the standard headlights with pop-ups has dramatically altered the GT-R's iconic looks. The instantly recognizable front end now looks just a bit off. Don't get us wrong, we love cars with pop-up headlights and we wish that modern vehicles could still have them today. But seeing the R34 GT-R, a car with such an iconic face, wearing pop-ups doesn't sit right. The R34 Skyline had such a simple yet aggressive design but with pop-ups, the car looks like it is trying too hard to appear angry.

We aren't alone in our opinion. Even the rendering artist himself agrees with us. "I'd say I'm sorry for this, but I'm not, I wanted to see what it would look like. I'm grateful it DIDN'T come with pop-ups though," Saleem said on his Instagram post.

Despite never being sold in the United States, word of the GT-R's greatness spread like wildfire thanks to digital media like the Gran Turismo video game series. Messing with such a successful formula is clearly ill-advised. The R34 is still too new to be legally eligible to import to the US but values are already skyrocketing so much, Nissan is starting to recreate parts to keep the cars roadworthy.

Perhaps the R34 Skyline is just too iconic a shape to be messed with. But many of the Skyline's contemporaries, like the FD generation Mazda RX-7, did have pop-up headlights, so perhaps Saleem is onto something with this rendering. Now we wonder what other '90s JDM legends might have looked cooler with pop-ups.