1994 Nissan 300ZX Sells for $135,000 and It Might Be the Most Expensive Ever
The Z32 went for crazy money, even by Bring a Trailer standards.
It's no secret that the Rad era is the newest hotspot in car collecting, but this 1994 Nissan 300ZX's auction end was still mind-boggling. The five-speed manual twin-turbo T-top model sold Monday for $135,000 on Bring a Trailer. That's almost double the previous most expensive 300ZX on the site, potentially making it the priciest twin-turbo '90s Z ever sold at auction.
The 300ZX was the pinnacle of Nissan's halo cars offered in the cash-and-tech-flush bubble economy. This one is, indeed, an exceptionally clean, well-documented, 22,000-mile example of the fastest 300ZX variant Nissan ever built, with twin turbochargers strapped to the 3.0-liter VG30DETT, all good for around 300 horsepower and a top speed in excess of 150 miles an hour. The car boasts four-wheel-steering, a factory Bose head unit, and heated mirrors, as well as extensive service records for its low miles.
What makes this sale so exceptional, however, is that it went for one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. The most expensive 300ZX I could find that's sold previously was an extremely rare variant, the numbered-300-of-300 30th anniversary special edition twin-turbo, which sold in 2017 for $90,100 on eBay. That car, in addition to its provenance, also boasted a mere 528 miles on its odometer.
More recently, a silver 1990 twin-turbo with 2,566 miles on the clock sold at an RM Sotheby's auction at the Amelia Island Concours in 2020 for $61,600. In fact, the entirety of Bring a Trailer's auction history for the model shows that no example has ever previously cracked the $75,000 mark (the highest price previously paid on the auction site was $72,500 in March of this year for a heavily-modified, 730-wheel-horsepower twin-turbo example). While I'm hesitant to definitively call this the most expensive Z32 ever sold, it looks like it just might be. There appears to be no specific reason for today's auction to have broken the record other than a persistent bidding war and an incredibly motivated winner.
On the bright side, that deep-pocketed buyer can now reenact the damn coolest car advertisement ever put to film (directed, of course, by Ridley Scott).
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