John Simister: A time for rebirth in the world of classic cars

Those continuation cars are entirely new, with previously unused chassis numbers and all new components. The Reborn cars have lived before but are born again, thanks to extremely thorough restorations done in the newly-created workshops of the cars' original manufacturers. The hope is that people will buy into an extra authenticity now revealed as not entirely present in a car restored by a specialist, however well regarded and long established. Is this muscling in, or is it making use of brand values to create a new niche? There's feather-ruffling potential here.

And now these resurrections are joined by another Rebirth from Jaguar Land Rover, in the form of E-type Reborn. The first of 10 planned examples, although JLR Classic had already practised on another one, was shown at the vast Techno Classica show at Essen, Germany on April 5^th and started life as a US-market coupé from 1965. Some of its many new panels have been pressed from the computer-perfected tooling developed during the Lightweight E-type programme, so the accuracy of panel fit and assembly should be fantastic. 

Jaguar describes the result as completely authentic and potentially concours-winning, but you'll have to pay around £285,000 to buy one. If that sounds a lot, it's actually around the same as one of the best-known restoration specialists, Eagle E-Types in Sussex, asks for its top cars in fairly standard specification. And it also means that an E-type once lost to the world – this 1965 car had been mouldering away in storage since 1983 – can now bounce back into it, as glamorous as ever.

That all sounds very good. So please now meet our next rebirth, or in this case perhaps a re-honing of something we all know and love into a crisper, tidier, cleaner, sparkier self as a record producer might enact upon the master tapes of a classic 1960s record album. It would be remastered, and we'd hear things we'd never quite heard before. 

BMW owns the Mini brand. British Motor Heritage, another of the many tentacles emerging from the wreckage of former British Leyland, makes brand new bodyshells for original-type, pre-BMW Minis. Would BMW ever countenance a Mini Reborn, perhaps using these BMH shells? Or would it be just too off-message for what the Mini brand has become? After all, when the original Minis were current, they were nothing whatsoever to do with BMW. 

Anyway, someone else has got there first. The Mini Remastered is the creation of David Brown Automotive. This company is nothing to do with the David Brown group which once owned Aston Martin Lagonda, although the enthusiastic boss has already launched one essentially handbuilt car, the DB Speedback. It's based on a Jaguar XKR and looks like a retro-modern re-make of, yes, an Aston Martin DB6, and so far several have been sold.

The Mini Remastered uses enough bones of a late 1990s 1275cc Mini (to make use of the fuel injection) to enable that car's registration identity to be kept when the Mini is Remastered into a new Heritage bodyshell. Those bones – engine, transmission, suspension components, front subframe and so on – are thoroughly restored and upgraded, and the shell is worked over in great detail. It loses the Mini's characteristic external seams, emulating the once-fashionable 'de-seamed' look but, thanks to lots of underskin strengthening, without the propensity once suffered of bursting apart at the now-vanished seams.

Many coats of painstakingly rubbed-down paint are applied over four weeks; a rounded front grille with the outline of an early Mini's, but the sparse slats of the DB Speedback, helps impart a racy, retro vibe. Machined aluminium surrounds for the front indicators and rear lights, and much more machined aluminium inside for the knobs, switches and stalks, look and are expensive. So are the thick leather seats, the 'infotainment' system, all the ample accessorisation. And it's slightly tuned-up, too, with 78bhp – 6bhp more than the original Mini-Cooper 1275S.

Personalisation options abound, including two ready-made themes: Monte Carlo and Café Racer. Mini purists will be horrified, of course; the forensic adherence to the original spec central to the reborn E-type is entirely vaporised here. It all sounds thoroughly good fun, though, and DB Automotive has a new factory at Silverstone to Remaster, it hopes, around 500 Minis over the next five years. Deposits have been received already, even though prices start at – deep breath – £75,000. You just have to hope they've cracked the Mini's rust problem.

In a way, given that this new Mini departs some distance from originality in its décor and detailing, this is a current-century reinterpretation of those ultra-lux Minis of the 1960s from Radford, Wood & Pickett, Margrave and no doubt others. Frankly, though, the Remastering is likely to be done to a rather higher standard under the skin than those cars were back then. It's a neat bit of niche exploitation, a great seizing of an opportunity. 

Which begs the question: what will be reborn next? A pre-impact-bumper Porsche 911 by Porsche Classic itself? A Citroën 2CV? A Lotus Elan? Or – whisper it – a Ferrari?