Tag Archives: S13

Drift Tax

Do you own a Japanese sports car from the 1990s? If so, your retirement is paid for. Because at the current trajectory, previously near-worthless Japanese metal will be valued at around $1billion a piece by 2030.

Supras, worth under £10,000 in TLCB’s home nation just a decade ago, are now up to £50,000. MR2s, which were scrap value just a few years ago, now make £10,000. And the humble Nissan 240SX – even a knackered ‘project car’, now costs five figures, with good examples north of £20,000. For a thirty year old Nissan!

We don’t pretend to understand it, but we suspect much of the hype is down to the video games Gen-X-ers and Millennials played two decades ago, which were awash with modified Japanese metal.

The resultant phenomenon today is a boom in ’90s Japanese sports cars, with all of them ending up looking likes this; 1saac W.’s superb modified Nissan Silvia / 240SX. Wide wheels, silly camber, a phat exhaust, and huge aero tick all the drifty boxes, and you can take a closer look at 1saac’s immensely valuable Nissan at his photostream.

Click the link above to pay the Drift Tax, whilst we rue the fact that Gran Turismo didn’t feature the sheddy old Rovers that make up TLCB carpark instead of ’90s Japanese sports cars…

Formula Drift

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1990s Japanese cars are rocketing in value. Now that the generation brought up on Playstation racing games are old enough to afford the cars they drove digitally as kids, demand for twenty-year-old Japanese boxes is at an all-time high. This is one such car, the Nissan 240SX/S13 fastback.

Easily modifiable, the 240SX has become a staple of the drift scene, even though in standard form it was (whisper it) quite a bland box. This brilliant Speed Champions style 240SX fastback in full drift spec comes from Flickr’s Simon Przepiorka, and it features probably the most perfect use for LEGO’s new quarter-tile pieces that we’ve seen yet – it’s almost as if LEGO designed them specifically with the S13’s rear lights in mind.

There’s more to see of Simon’s superb S13 at his Flickr photostream – click this link to get sideways and this one to view the other excellent Speed Champions style cars in his online garage.

Elf For a Day

The Elves are going hungry at the moment, because for the last few days they haven’t found a thing. Luckily for us, you guys have, and so today we have three of your finds. On the left is MOCpages’ Jase G’s ‘Little Bit of Muscle‘, which the Elves would probably like to have found themselves, in the centre is a lovely Town-scale Chevrolet G20 van by a builder known simply as ‘Ben’, and on the right is Yoong Cherng Ee’s awesome looking Nissan Silvia S13 in full time-attack spec.

You can see more of each model by clicking on the links in the text, and if you’d like to suggest a creation to us here at TLCB you can do so via FlickrMail, the Submission Suggestions page, or by completing the Feedback form. You can also let us know if you’d like guest blogger status – if your english skills are good your words could appear alongside your find here too!