Recently, we noticed a batch of Japanese sports coupes taking home some surprising numbers on Bring A Trailer and Cars & Bids. In an era where there’s some modest cooling of the marketplace, seeing three decidedly commonplace vehicles each handily clear $20,000 was worthy of analysis.
We looked at the following cars: a 1997 Nissan 240SX that sold for $27,250; a SW20 chassis Toyota MR2 Turbo for $29,250; and the real kicker, a 1983 Datsun 280ZX Turbo for a heady $25,000. These are all very strong numbers, and while there’s been plenty said about some unusually high exchanges of money on BaT, these cars were not expensive enough to suggest a backdoor card game of the digital sort; no, these were just three pools of bidders who really, really wanted otherwise unremarkable cars.
Buyers of Japanese classics are their own breed. European car fanatics get caught up in provenance, maintenance history, and whether someone who once lived on the same street as Brian Redman owned the car in question. For purveyors of Japanese models, the scale is tilted far more towards how stock the car remains and whether the bidder owned the same car in their 20s. It’s not to say nostalgia doesn’t matter for European car shoppers; quite the opposite, in fact: have you ever listened to a man blubber about justifying paying $120,000 for an air-cooled 911?
But that same 911 buyer will have a strong bead on the likelihood they’ll make some money on their long-hood time machine. The guy dropping $30,000 on an S14 240SX is not thinking about ROI, just that he wrapped the same car around a tree in 11th grade (ah, memories - powerful stuff.) In a way, the buyers of those cars are transported back to high school, knowing full well they’d spend all of dad’s money if given the chance to pay full retail for their adolescent dream car.
How else do you justify dumping $25,000 on one of the most unremarkable Z cars ever made? Listen, I’ve made plenty of bad decisions when it comes to cars, but I couldn’t live the life some Japanese car enthusiasts do where they don’t even flinch at bidding the lights out if the car in question is the model they once almost owned, or previously lost to a tragedy or teenage hijinks.
All that is to say, don’t expect your dad’s old Z car to suddenly be an auction-worthy specimen, or a tired MR2 to be worth any more than the $10,000 or so they typically command. It takes the right buyer, the right car, and timing that is entirely dependent on the cosmic alignment of the universe. While we may find the high rollers on the European side of the house unsufferable on occasion, they are at least consistent.