Ken Okuyama Cars unveiled its new flagship, the Kode89, on the Concept Lawn of the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance on August 16 — a Japanese-built mid-engined supercar with a naturally aspirated V12 and a manual gearbox, named for a year Okuyama regards as the high-water mark of car design. The company confirmed the world premiere on its own news page, adding that the car had made a preview appearance three days earlier on the Tour d'Elegance.
Japanese reports published ahead of the debut outline a proprietary aluminum spaceframe with the twelve-cylinder engine mounted longitudinally behind the cabin, paired with a manual transmission, and suggest more than one V12 configuration may be offered. Two of those reports speculate that Ferrari-derived engines could form the basis of the lineup, but neither Ken Okuyama Cars nor Ferrari has confirmed that. The car is built in Japan using advanced materials, 3D-printed components and five-axis machining, and is intended for extremely limited, bespoke production for both road and track use.
Ken Okuyama Cars has still not published a technical specification. No displacement, output figure, price or production number has been announced, and the company's own one-off model page continues to list only its five earlier cars — kode61, kode57, kode0, kode9 and kode7.
Why the Kode89 is named after 1989
The name is not a chassis code. Okuyama has described the car as an homage to 1989, the year he considers the peak of car design, and the specific reference point is the Pininfarina Mythos — the Testarossa-based concept that broke cover at the 1989 Tokyo Motor Show. The Kode89 can be read as an answer to a question the Mythos left open: what might it have become as a road car?
That framing has a second reading for anyone who follows Japanese cars. 1989 is also the year the R32 Skyline GT-R arrived, the year Honda unveiled the NS-X prototype at the Chicago Auto Show, the year the Mazda Roadster went on sale, the year the Z32 300ZX landed and the year Toyota launched the Celsior at home and the LS400 abroad. Okuyama is pointing at Italian design history; the number he picked happens to be one of the most consequential years in modern Japanese performance-car history.
His other stated ambition is more pointed. Okuyama argues that Italy's traditional carrozzeria culture — low-volume, designer-led coachbuilding — has faded, and that Japan can provide a new home for it.
Who is Ken Okuyama
Okuyama brings decades of experience from some of the industry's most influential studios. Born in Yamagata in 1959, he was a chief designer at General Motors and a senior designer at Porsche before joining Pininfarina in 1995, becoming its first Japanese chief designer in 1998 and its design director in 2004. His Pininfarina-era credits include work on the Enzo Ferrari and the Maserati Quattroporte. He left in 2006 to build his own studio in Japan, and Ken Okuyama Cars has been designing, building and selling handmade sports cars from its Yamagata factory since 2007.
Monterey is familiar ground for the company: the kode57 and the kode0 both had their world premieres at The Quail during Car Week. This year's debut also lands at the end of the same week that made Japanese motorsport the featured marque at the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion, which finished on August 15 — a fitting coda to a Car Week that put Japanese motoring history in the spotlight.
Update (August 18): Ken Okuyama Cars has confirmed the world premiere took place on the Concept Lawn on August 16. Full specifications have still not been released; we will update again when they are.