Nissan 300ZX

This is the catalogue record of the Nissan 300ZX, one of 318 models Nissan has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1983. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Nissan 300ZX properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Fiat Fiat Uno, the Peugeot Peugeot 205, the Toyota Toyota 4Runner — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Nissan 300ZX reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.0 L Nissan VG engine#VG20ET / VG20ET Turbocharger / turbo V6 engine / V6 (200Z/ZG/ZS) / 2.0 L Nissan RB engine#RB20 / RB20DET turbo DOHC Straight-six engine / I6 (200ZR; kerb weight is recorded at 2888 -; drive goes through 5-speed Nissan transmission / FS5W71C manual / 5-speed Borg-Warner T-5 transmission / FS5R90A manual / 5-speed Nissan Transmission / FS5R30A manual / 4-speed Jatco Jatco 4N71 trans; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Nissan story

Within Nissan's own catalogue the Nissan 300ZX sits alongside the Nissan N6, the Nissan N7, the Nissan NX8, the DeltaWing. The record names the Nissan Fairlady Z (S130) as its predecessor and the Nissan 350Z as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Kazumasu Takagi (1982). Assembly is recorded at Japan: Hiratsuka, Kanagawa (Nissan Shatai) / South Africa: Rosslyn, South Africa / Rosslyn (1992–1994, Nissan South Africa).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Nissan 300ZX was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.