Just imagine how much attention you would get if you drove-up in an old Zil, like this one.
About 25 years ago, there was one sitting on a used car lot in Avenel, NJ, and I did a double-take when I drove past it. A few days later, I pulled in to look at it. It wasn’t in great condition, and I think it would be nearly impossible to get parts for it in The US, but it disappeared a few months later, so apparently somebody did buy it.
While the Zil looked like a near-copy of a late '50s Packard, it supposedly had nothing in common mechanically with Packards.
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Yes, but imagine swapping the engine, transmission and maybe even the rear axle from a Ford F150 or Chevy Sierra and cruising the local Cars and Coffee… You would draw a crowd every time!
Whatever man made, another can re-make! Especially with 3-axis machining and 3-D printing!
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I think it depends on the crowd. It would likely attract a LOT of attention from guys who are 70+, but I think that most younger people’s reactions would be something along the lines of… it’s just an old car… with no knowledge of its origin.
Supposedly, these cars used an automatic transmission that was an exact copy of Chrysler’s 2-speed PowerFlite, so perhaps an easy swap would be a Chrysler “A” polyspheric head V8, or perhaps even an older Hemi engine. Either might mate-up with that trans… if the statements about its design are true.
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I wish my dad had kept his 1970 442, although I probably would have wrecked it. 
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I’ve known some machinists (my Dad included) that could make just about anything with a completely manual engine lathe or mill. Those craftsmen are all but gone now. Heck, these days you can take a picture of something existing and it gets input into the 3D CAD program or those 3D pens where you simply touch various points on the sample and it forms the model from that.
But it is interesting to consider that the machines making integrated circuits today, rely on the same parts to function as they are making…
I recall decades ago, the machine shop foreman came to me asking if we could repair their NC control (notice no leading C) for their end mill. I opened the control head to find a massive perf board logic card with hundreds of DIP ICs in wire wrap sockets. The backside was a bird’s nest of wire wrap wire. Reverse engineered plenty of stuff in my career but that was not going to happen. Fortunately, the manufacturer had the basis of a schematic but even they were astounded- that must be one of our prototypes! Got it working but replaced it with a circuit board that they sent to us later.
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