G35 with Q50 Front and R35 GT-R Rear: Breaking Down a Wild Body Conversion

ByKenji Alvarez

A G35 With a Q50 Face and an R35 GT-R Tail: What’s Actually Going On

Someone grafted a Q50 front end onto a G35 coupe body, then stitched on the rear end of an R35 Nissan GT-R. There are barely two photos of it online. The car raises a specific question that’s been floating around since the images surfaced: what did they do with the trunk?

This kind of build doesn’t come from a body kit catalog. It’s real fabrication work — metal, fiberglass, filler, and a lot of time. Here’s how it breaks down.

The Three Cars Involved

The Infiniti G35 Coupe (2003–2007, V35 platform) is a rear-wheel-drive two-door built on Nissan’s FM platform — the same basic structure as the 350Z. The Q50 (V37, launched 2014) is a sports sedan that replaced the G sedan, with sharper, more angular styling and a completely different body architecture. The R35 Nissan GT-R has been in production since 2007 on its own dedicated platform, with all-wheel drive and a rear-mounted transaxle.

None of these share bolt patterns or body mounting points. That’s the point — this isn’t a parts-bin swap, it’s a custom fabrication project.

The Q50 Front End: The Easier Half

Swapping a modern nose onto an older body happens fairly often in custom car culture. The process involves cutting out the original front clip — hood, fenders, bumper support, headlight buckets — and grafting in the donor car’s equivalent structure. What makes it manageable is that most of the work stays above the structural rails and firewall, which remain untouched.

The Q50 and G35 are different widths and different generations, so this isn’t a bolt-on swap. The fabricator has to reshape fender edges and bridge gaps where the two body widths diverge. Getting the hood line to flow naturally into the G35’s original roofline is where real skill shows. Companies like LOJ Conversions sell front-fascia kits within the Q50 family, which shows how common these reshuffles are inside Infiniti’s platform universe — but those swap within one generation. Cross-generation is a different level of work.

The R35 GT-R Rear: Where It Gets Hard

The R35 GT-R’s rear end is one of the most recognizable shapes in modern performance cars. Wide haunches, quad exhaust tips, aggressive diffuser — none of it looks like the G35’s comparatively understated tail. The GT-R is also a physically wider car overall.

To put that rear end on a G35, you’re not bolting on a bumper cover. The outer panels — quarter panels, tail lights, bumper surround — either come from an actual R35 or are replicated in fiberglass. Either way, the fabricator cuts back the G35’s original quarters and integrates the new structure. That means reshaping the inner wheel arches, extending the body width to accept the wider rear section, and rebuilding the tail largely from scratch.

Fiberglass is the go-to material for the new surfaces. Sections get laid up over a foam or clay buck, trimmed, and bonded into the surrounding sheetmetal. The seam where fiberglass meets factory metal is where build quality either shows or disappears — good bodywork makes it invisible, poor work shows as a wave in raking light.

The Trunk: The Question Worth Asking

The G35 Coupe has a hatchback-style trunk lid that opens at the beltline, with the tail lights integrated into the body. The R35 GT-R has a separate rear deck with a fixed spoiler. They’re fundamentally different shapes.

On a build like this, the trunk almost certainly isn’t two stock lids joined together. What typically happens: the fabricator uses the GT-R’s lower tail section and diffuser as the visual reference, grafts that form into the car’s rear structure, and rebuilds the trunk lid opening to match wherever the new rear edge ends up. The opening mechanism — hinges, latch, struts — gets relocated or rebuilt to suit.

It’s slow work. A skilled metalworker might spend 80 to 120 hours just on the rear section before filler or paint. The reason there are no side-profile photos is almost certainly that the transition from G35 roofline down into the wider GT-R-styled rear is where the hardest work lives, and where gaps and mismatched contours tend to be most visible. Shops often shoot builds from the front three-quarter and rear three-quarter for exactly this reason.

Body Kits vs. This Kind of Build

There are GT-R-inspired body kits for the G35 — Carbon Creations, Duraflex, and APR all make them. APR’s GTR35 Widebody Aerodynamic Kit adds 45mm to the front and 50mm per side to the rear, giving the car an aggressive stance without cutting into factory sheetmetal.

What’s in that photo is different. The Q50 front end and R35 rear architecture aren’t catalog components — they’re either sourced from donor vehicles or hand-laid to match. That puts this in a different category from a body kit install. This is full custom coachwork.

Is It Real?

Almost certainly yes. The photos that circulated don’t show the typical tells of a composited image — mismatched shadows, pixel bleed at panel transitions, inconsistent depth of field across the body. The scarcity of documentation fits the pattern of a private commission, possibly from a shop in Southeast Asia or Japan where this type of fabrication work gets done at a high level for comparatively modest cost.

One-off commissioned builds often get posted once to a shop’s Instagram and then vanish. Without a tag linking to the shop’s profile, the image circulates indefinitely as a mystery. That’s almost certainly what’s happened here.

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