Great Cars Under $ 1000 – All-Star Profiles – Nissan 240sx

One of the most popular platforms on the tuning market. Whether you’re looking to hit road races, auto crossovers, drift, drag, or just fast, the Nissan 240sx is one of the best giant killers out there.

Introduced in 1989, the 240sx has everything a great sports car should have. Rear-wheel drive, independent suspension, disc brakes, and lightweight chassis. Extremely popular in its native Japan, the 240sx has been well known to many for years as an ideal tuning platform. However, the main drawback, as many see it, is that when it arrived on our shores in the US, Nissan loaded these cars with the KA24DE which of course is a perfectly decent engine and has a lot of adjustability, But considering that in Japan we were selling with the much more popular and powerful SR20DET, it’s hard not to feel like we were misled a bit.

Fortunately for us, however, one of the best parts about the 240sx and most Nissan’s is that they are incredibly good candidates for engine changes. The most popular change is the turbocharged SR20DET, but people are also cramming everything from horizon engines to even LS1s with corvettes. The 240sx is just one of those chassis that can not only handle the new found power, but also maintain its excellent handling characteristics. Also because the 240sx is such an attractive platform for tuning, there is basically an unlimited supply of parts, from smooth mods to full tilt race setups.

Tips for buying one: First-generation cars will be the ones that will fall in the price range below $ 1000 and there are still plenty of unmodified cars that can be found cheaply. However, keep in mind that these cars are still sought after and a clean chassis will be priced decently. A good tip for those of you already looking to make a trade is to find an unfinished project that someone else will bite the dust. Doing this can save you a great deal of cash on parts and maybe even have a nice head start in getting the car where you want it to be faster. For those of you who are performance conscious, I would recommend steer clear of convertible models as they tend to be much heavier and have less chassis stiffness.

So if you’re looking for your next tuner project it’s hard to go wrong with a 240sx, no matter how many there are, you can always have the opportunity to make it your own and have something that’s fun to drive and different.