Recreating Classic Vehicles with Old Vins on New Bodies - VW Vans?

IE: Replicas or Retromods or whatever. Replacement tubs?

How many companies do this? Manufacture a new body in white, attach an old vin, add some new engines, electronics, etc, and sell for roughly the same cost (or cheaper) than the original is going for used? 

I'm looking at the VW Vanagon or Westfalia Syncro.

The are selling for $20,000-$30,000 used, with inefficient engines, dated electronics, and tons of miles. Sometimes some pretty significant rust as well. 

I'm surprised someone hasn't done for VW Vans what various companies do for Jeeps. Produce reproduction bodies. Sell a new Westfalia body for $10k, attach a vin and running gear from a rusted hunk of a Vanagon. 

Not legal to completely rebody something in most places.  There is a certain amount of original body that has to be there, which is generally the cowl/firewall area.  I'm sure lots of people lie and get away with it quite nicely, and that is the way I would do it if I ever really wanted a Dynacorn Mustang.

I would also accept the fact that I might just be screwing myself in the long run.

I believe much of it has to do with licensing. Ford, GM and Chrysler have agreements with companies like Dynacorn.  Right or wrong, I have a feeling VW would squash such an idea rather quickly as they seem fairly protective of their heritage and its image.

Wasn't there a new law that sema got passed about new vins for reproduction bodies?

You can do this with a number of Little British Cars. It all depends on the availability of the original tooling, I suspect. IIRC the Vanagon was built in South Africa most recently, maybe that's where you want to look for a source.

I'd expect "they" would start with a 23 window Microbus; it would have to be about the same price to reproduce as a Vanagon, but could be sold for a lot more.

Pretty much illegal to swap a VIN number/plate onto another body. Hot Rod builders have been busted for putting old VINs on new hot rod bodies and selling them as the old car. Even here in lax Georgia, the new Dynacorn bodies get new VIN assigned to them, after jumping through some hoops. They check for hidden VINs on the cars during the inspection, so it would be hard to pass off a new body as the original one.

Boyd Coddington went down for this, look up Ship of Theseus fraud.  

I have George Washinton's axe, only the handle and the head have been replaced.  

93gsxturbo said:

Boyd Coddington went down for this

I did a quick googles on that.  It appears the only thing the state of California really cared about, was the lost revenue from taxes.   

I remember years ago a bunch of fiat enthusiasts tried to buy the tooling off of pininfarina to reproduce panels for the 124 spider. There was not an offer high enough to let the italians let those parts go. So they still sit in a warehouse, while there are plenty of rusty 124s out there looking for good sheetmetal