Back in 1992, I bought a new car. It was one of the outright weirdest looking cars at the time, and possibly even in most of recent memory. It was the Nissan NX2000.
Mine was white, not red. And, as you may be able to tell from the front end, it’s one of the absolutely weirdest-looking fronts. The first time I laid eyes on the one that would become mine, my first thought was “I didn’t realize it was going to be that ugly.” But then, I quickly got used to it. It has a bit of novelty.
The 2000 model (compared with the 1600) had a 2.0L inline-4 engine and – while you may not be able to tell from the above picture – T-Tops. This meant that, while driving, I could remove either half or all of the roof, sort of as a half-assed convertible. While there were rear seats, no adult who possessed legs would realistically be sitting back there.
At the time, it was not the “Car of my Dreams”, but I enjoyed driving it and it handled extremely well. To this day, I still claim that the NX taught me how to drive well. Since the NX was, indeed, “my” car, I drove it everywhere. In modern terminology, it was my “daily driver”. For about a year and a half, I was commuting 100 miles (round trip) daily.
Eventually, I had a deer jump out in front of me and I didn’t have time to react and that was the sad end for my NX.
Feeling Nostalgic
Recently-ish, as both of my sons have reached driving age, I’ve had a strong sense of nostalgia for it. Not just for the NX itself, but also for those T-Tops. Yes, I know there are a lot of people who would say, “Just think about a convertible, idiot!” but it’s not the same thing and I can’t really explain well. Being able to pop just “half” the roof and tuck the panel behind the driver’s seat, or stash it under the hatch is just .. well… cool!
So, with this incredibly strong sense of nostalgia, I’ve been non-seriously searching for used NXs. Unfortunately, there were sooo few of them sold in the US that they’re basically impossible to find. [Seriously – they were sold only between 1991 and 1993 and there were under 20,000 units sold across all three years.]
False Alarm
My younger son recently found an ad for one locally that seemed to be in good shape. “Seemed to be” being the operative words, of course. We went to see it and it had some fairly significant rust issues (own of the downsides of living in New Jersey, where winter roads are regularly salted heavily, among other things). The engine was also a complete swap out for a similar one and was heavily rebuilt. There were enough other things about the car that, no matter how much I really wanted it, I just couldn’t bring myself to seriously contemplate buying it.
Inspired (?) by this, I decided to do another search of as many places as I could think of. In some cases, because the search filters were limited, I would see a lot of other cars that weren’t NXs.
Find Of The Century
And that’s when I stumbled on what I considered to be the absolute find of the century – possibly even a couple of centuries. I found a 1995 Nissan 300ZX with less than 100K miles, looking like it rolled out of the showroom yesterday. And the car dealer only wanted $6600 for it. This is a steal. Based on the dealer, and seeing a video showing the car running, as far as I can tell, there is not anything wrong with the car – it’s just priced dirt cheap. [The banner image is the car I’m talking about.]
It’s not the much-more-in-demand Twin-Turbo version of the engine, so it “only” has a 3.0L V6. It has my much-beloved T-Tops, of course, as all Zs of the era did. Oh, and the undercarriage appears to be clean enough you could eat off of it.
Yes, that is actually the underside of this car. And, yes, this is a 1995 car with just under 100K miles on it. The car has one … minor … manufacturing defect, but it’s not nearly something which I consider insurmountable.
As you can see – they put the steering wheel on the wrong side. No, this is not a reversed picture. The car in the above image is legitimately heading left.
JDM Car
Ok. I may have been leading things on a bit. This is what’s known as a “JDM” car – Japanese Domestic Market. Which is to say, the car currently resides in Japan, and will need to be imported to the US.
There are additional fees and a bit of a “process” involved in getting the car from Japan to here in the US, and there will be some delays because international shipping is an absolute mess right now. But it’s certainly possible to get the car transported.
Long Story Short
And, so – the “TL;DR” version of this is … I’m buying a used sports car to have some fun with. The 300ZX is a fairly iconic car and performs / handles well. I’m sure I’ll be freaking out a lot of other people due to being on the “wrong” side when I’m driving, but that just makes it “even cooler”.
Wish me luck with the purchase and then with my travels once it’s here.
