Initial D is a comic about a teenager who is bored of driving. Shuichi Shigeno began serialising it in Kodansha's Weekly Young Magazine on 17 July 1995 and finished on 29 July 2013 — eighteen years of street racing in the mountains of Gunma. Its protagonist, Takumi Fujiwara, delivers tofu for his father Bunta down Mount Akina before school, and is quicker down it than people who bought their cars specifically to be quick. He is not trying to impress anyone. That is the joke, and it is also why the series worked.
The car matters because it is so ordinary. Toyota built the AE86 from May 1983 to July 1987 as the last rear-wheel-drive Corolla, while the rest of the range moved to front-wheel drive around it. The engine is a 1,587 cc twin-cam four — the 4A-GEU, 130 PS in Japanese tune — and the whole car weighs between 900 and 1,065 kg. Takumi's is the Sprinter Trueno, the version with retractable headlights where the Corolla Levin wore fixed ones, in GT-APEX trim, white over black, lettered 藤原とうふ店（自家用） on the door: Fujiwara Tofu Shop, private use.
By 1995 that car was a decade old and worth very little, which is the premise working as designed — and it is also why the AE86 became the cheapest way to learn to slide a car. Road & Track later called it "a cult icon, inextricably interwoven with the earliest days of drifting". The manga finished the job: the resale premium on a used Corolla now has a name, the "Takumi tax".
Aoshima's Snap Kit CM-1 is that car at 1/32, moulded in colour and built without glue or paint. The box carries the Initial D 30th anniversary mark, and first-press copies came with a fold-up 「峠」 papercraft pass.