The paint code sticker has a corner of the laminate flipped up a bit. The sticker is solid, the backing is solid, it is just a small part of the corner.
Everyone is caught up on the door jams, LOOK AT THE ENGINE COMPARTMENT. All the cross members are silver, the labels are all there and dirty. It looks like the engine compartment has never been cleaned. It is dusty and has normal grime.
Everyone here is making speculations on a car they have never seen in person.
Come to the shop and look. If this car was repainted to Sebring Silver then the whole car was stripped apart and it was a long time ago. I will work on taking more photos, possible tomorrow or Monday and post them on my site,
www.mycarcorner.com
As I stated previously, only a detailed inspection in person of the actual car will yield answers at this point.
It doesn't matter if it's the sticker itself or the laminate flipped up. The point is that most other cars have labels that are nice and flat, with no defects, but this one does not. Why? I've seen enough of these to know that the laminate under normal conditions will not flip up unless an attempt was made to peel the label off from where it was originally applied.
That said, I'm not saying that it is not a factory Sebring Silver, but it cannot be definitively proved to be one based on pictures of the labels alone.
Engine compartment being silver doesn't mean anything in itself - those can be repainted outside the factory too, and I've seen it done. The underhood labels are all available as replacements outside the factory - so their presence doesn't prove anything in itself either.
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You can't compare a 10 year difference from any car company no matter how good. Also remember, this car was not planned to be this color. Cars are done by machine when painted at the factory, this car was painted a color that wasn't done for 3 years, 1993 was the last year for this color. The car could have been pulled aside and done by hand at the factory.
Don't assume this car was treated the same way as others if it was a special order by a man who was buying 15 of these a year!
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Excused me, the article reads a few a year for 15 years.
I've seen plenty of 1991-1992 cars, including ones with 200K+ miles, with no special attention paid to preserving the labels, and the labels are nice and flat, as they came from the factory. If anything, I've probably seen more of these labels than anyone outside the factory, and something is different with the labels on this particular car.
Sebring Silver was available in Japan and other markets for the entire production run of the NSX, just not in the US after 1993. So, as far as the factory was concerned, they were building Sebring Silver cars all along, so if this one is indeed a factory Sebring Silver, no special attention or procedure would have been needed in building it, and it would have left the factory like any other NSX, with no defects in the labels or otherwise.
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You can not say it is not factory work. You don't know because you have never seen the car in person.
You are right - we cannot say at this point that it is not a factory job - it very well may be. But, we also cannot prove that it definitively is a factory job either based on the information and photos that have been posted.
Only a detailed inspection of the actual car by someone who knows what to look for will determine anything.