Z (Fairlady Z / 240Z through Z)

The Z That Never Really Stopped: Datsun/Nissan's Continuous Sports Car

In October 1969, a two-seat coupe with a long hood and a six-cylinder engine went on sale in Tokyo showrooms as the Fairlady Z, and almost simultaneously reached American dealers as the Datsun 240Z. The Japanese and export names told two different stories about the same car. In Japan, "Fairlady" traced back to a Nissan executive's fondness for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady; in the United States, Nissan's export arm dropped that name entirely and sold the car on its displacement and a number, 240Z, because Yutaka Katayama (the president of Nissan's US sales operation, remembered later by enthusiasts as "Mr. K") believed American buyers wanted a serious sports car, not a novelty import. Katayama had spent years pushing Tokyo to build something more ambitious than the small, low-powered Fairlady roadsters Nissan had exported through the 1960s. He got his six-cylinder coupe, and he got to set its price: a base sticker that Wikipedia gives as $3,626, positioned well under contemporary European sports cars like the Jaguar E-Type and the Porsche 911 while offering comparable performance and a more modern unit-body chassis. That price-to-performance margin is the single fact that explains everything the Z-car became in North America: not a curiosity, but a credible, attainable alternative to cars costing two or three times as much.

The 240Z's shock to the European sports-car establishment was not subtle. Road testers on both sides of the Atlantic noted a car with double-wishbone front and independent rear suspension, a five-speed-optional gearbox, and a smooth 2.4-liter overhead-cam six, wrapped in a body whose long-nose, short-tail proportions borrowed openly from European GT design language without apologizing for it. For established sports-car makers, many of them small and thinly capitalized, a mass-manufactured Japanese product with strong reliability, a domestic parts network, and a price a schoolteacher could stretch to reach was a different kind of competitor than anything they had faced before. Wikipedia's Nissan Z-car entry gives the widely repeated figure of over 520,000 S30-generation cars sold worldwide across its nine-year run.

Racing did as much for the Z's American credibility as the showroom did. Peter Brock, who had earlier shaped the Shelby Daytona Coupe, founded Brock Racing Enterprises and built 240Zs for SCCA competition. Driven by John Morton, BRE's 240Zs won the SCCA C Production national championship in both 1970 and 1971. That was a road-racing pedigree earned in a production-based class against purpose-built sports cars. The C Production titles gave dealers and enthusiast magazines a concrete answer to the obvious question: can this Japanese car actually be raced seriously? Nissan leaned into that answer for the rest of the decade.

As the 1970s wore on and US emissions and safety regulation tightened, the car grew heavier and, in the view of many longtime owners, softer. The 260Z of 1974 added a 2+2 body option and slightly more displacement; the 280Z, sold from 1975, adopted Bosch electronic fuel injection to meet emissions targets that carburetors could no longer satisfy cleanly. The S130-generation 280ZX, introduced for the 1979 model year, completed the shift from lean sports coupe to something closer to a personal luxury GT: available T-tops, a digital dashboard option, and by 1981 the first turbocharged Z, the L28ET-powered Turbo model. Nissan's home-market badge stayed Fairlady Z; the export badge slowly stopped saying "Datsun" at all, as the company began a multi-year, market-by-market transition to the Nissan name that started in the early 1980s.

The Z31-generation 300ZX, launched in Japan in September 1983 and reaching US showrooms as a 1984 model, marked the point where the car became fully "Nissan" rather than "Datsun" in most markets, and where the engineering shifted decisively to V6 power: Japan's first mass-produced 60-degree V6, offered in naturally aspirated and Garrett-turbocharged form. It was a competent, popular car, but the generation that most reshaped the Z's reputation arrived in spring 1989 as the Z32: an all-new 300ZX with dramatically curved bodywork, available naturally aspirated and twin-turbocharged V6 engines, and handling that period magazines rated among the best in the world regardless of price. Motor Trend reportedly placed it second only to the Acura NSX. The Twin Turbo made roughly 300 horsepower, ran to 60 mph in about six seconds, and did all of it while carrying a price that had crept toward $50,000 by the mid-1990s. That price was the car's undoing in America: as the yen strengthened against the dollar, US sales collapsed, and Nissan pulled the car from the American market after the 1996 model year. For roughly seven years, there was officially no new Z-car for sale in the United States. It was the most consequential break in the nameplate's history.

Nissan's answer, when it came, was a deliberate return to the founding idea. The 350Z, revealed for the 2003 model year, was explicitly positioned as a spiritual return to the original 240Z's affordability: a base price near $26,000, a naturally aspirated 3.5-liter V6 with no turbo complexity to price in, and a stripped-down, driver-focused interior. It sold well from the outset (US sales reportedly climbed from roughly 13,000 units in a partial 2002 launch year to nearly 37,000 in full-year 2003) and reestablished the Z as a car ordinary enthusiasts, not just well-off ones, could put in their driveway. The 370Z that followed in 2008/2009 refined rather than reinvented the formula, running with only modest changes for an unusually long twelve-year production span; by the time the roadster body style was dropped after 2020, US demand had thinned considerably, but the coupe carried on to the end with NISMO and 50th Anniversary editions for the nameplate's own half-century.

The current Z, internally coded RZ34 and sold in the US from late 2022 as a 2023 model, closes the loop that the Z32-to-Z33 break first opened: rather than disappearing again, Nissan moved directly from the outgoing 370Z to a new car built around a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V6 shared with the Infiniti Q50/Q60, offered with a manual gearbox that many rivals had already abandoned, and styled with a nose drawn from the original S30 and a tail-light treatment lifted almost directly from the Z32. Fifty-plus years after Yutaka Katayama argued that Americans would pay for a sports car if the price was honest, Nissan's newest Z is still being sold, at least in part, on that same premise.

Partial production and sales numbers exist for two of the Z-car's least-quantified stretches. For the Z32-generation 300ZX, zhome.com's Z Car Production table gives US model-year totals of 39,290 units in the car's strong 1990 debut year, falling to 17,653 in 1991 and down into the single-digit thousands by 1994-95, for a US-only subtotal near 82,460 across 1990-1995. For the 350Z, Nissan's September 2003 sales release and autoevolution's annual US sales series from 2004 through 2008 add up to a US total near 161,878 across the model's full 2002-2008 run. Other circulating estimates put the US total at roughly 148,000-149,600 units, and anusedcar.com puts the global total at about 155,000, below the US sum alone. Wikipedia gives the 370Z roughly 130,000 units worldwide across its twelve-year run.

The Designers Behind Seven Generations of "Z"

Every generation of Z-car after the S30 carries a named designer's fingerprints, and tracing them shows a nameplate that Nissan kept re-anchoring to the same idea even as the people doing the work changed completely. The Z32-generation 300ZX, the car period magazines rated among the best-handling in the world regardless of price, had its exterior credited to two Nissan designers, Isao Sono and Toshio Yamashita, with the final design approved by Nissan management on 1 October 1986; Yamashita had joined Nissan back in 1968 doing parts design for the A10 Violet before finally landing the Z-car design assignment in 1984. When the nameplate crossed the Pacific for its 2003 relaunch as the 350Z, the exterior design was led by Diane Allen, chief designer at Nissan Design America's Red Studio in San Diego, working with designer Ajay Panchal. That is a striking detail in itself, since a car built explicitly to recapture a 1969 roadster's back-to-basics spirit was shaped by an American design studio rather than Nissan's Japanese home office. The 370Z that followed carried the exterior signature of Randy Rodriguez, another Nissan Design America veteran, who later left to become a senior designer at Tesla. The current RZ34-generation Z closed the loop deliberately: its exterior, by designer Naoyuki Ohkoshi, and interior, by Takuya Yamashita, were developed under Nissan's global design chief Alfonso Albaisa with an explicit brief to reference the original 1970 240Z. The cues were the long hood, the roofline, and a grille and tail-light treatment drawn straight from the S30 and Z32 respectively. Few nameplates this old can point to a named designer for essentially every major generation; the Z can.

Privateer Champions Beyond BRE

Peter Brock's BRE effort is the Z-car's best-known American racing story, but it was not the only one, and it was not even the only Datsun team winning national championships in the 1970s. Bob Sharp Racing, working out of Danbury, Connecticut, built 260Z-based race cars for the 1975 IMSA GTU season and won the championship outright. It was reported as Nissan's first professional racing title in the United States, a milestone distinct from BRE's earlier SCCA amateur/club titles. The following year, a rival privateer squad, Brad Frisselle's Transcendental Racing, took the same IMSA GTU title with a 240Z, winning eight of the eleven events it entered that season. That meant back-to-back GTU championships for Datsun Z-cars fielded by two entirely different teams. Transcendental's effort would later evolve, under new ownership by John Knepp and Don Devendorf, into Electramotive, the outfit that eventually built and ran Nissan's turbocharged GTP ZX-Turbo prototypes in IMSA's top class through the late 1980s. The same organizational lineage that started campaigning production-based 240Zs in the mid-1970s ended up, a decade later, running full prototype race cars at the front of America's premier sports-car series.

Japan had its own, less internationally famous branch of Z-car racing that ran in parallel. Nissan built a small homologation-special run of the Fairlady Z432 (reportedly only 420 examples, all sold domestically), fitted with the S20 engine borrowed from the "Hakosuka" Skyline GT-R, and campaigned a Z432-R competition version at the 1970 Fuji 1000km. Two years later, the purpose-built Group 4 homologation car that followed it, the 240ZG (chassis code HS30-H), proved out in GTS-II competition trim with a 2870cc, roughly 300-horsepower LY28 engine, winning the 1972 Fuji Grand Champion series and the 1973 Suzuka 1000km. These domestic Japanese circuit results rarely make it into English-language accounts of the Z's racing history, even though they run on the same competitive timeline as BRE's American SCCA titles.

On Screen and Behind the Wheel, Digitally

The Z-car's film and gaming presence has kept renewing itself well past the S30 era. In 2023's Fast X, a car liveried as a Datsun 240Z, identified by vehicle-spotting databases as a modified 1975 Datsun 280Z underneath the badging, is driven by the character Isabel Neves, putting the original Z body style on screen in a franchise installment more than five decades after the real car's debut. In racing games, the current Z has stepped into the same digital spotlight its ancestors once held: the RZ34-generation Nissan Z and its NISMO variant have been added to Forza Horizon 5, Forza Motorsport, and Gran Turismo 7, continuing a video-game presence for the nameplate that stretches back to the earliest Gran Turismo Concept spin-off releases built around Nissan's Z-cars.

A specialist Z31 registry breaks the generation's total down as 329,900 units worldwide, split between 294,516 exported (270,144 of those to the United States alone) and 35,384 sold domestically in Japan. The bare 329,900 figure is sometimes ambiguous about whether it is a global or an American total; the registry's breakdown indicates it is global, and the export share alone (294,516) comes close enough to the headline number to explain the confusion.