Nissan 240SX

The 240SX arrived for 1989 with the S13's brilliant chassis and a truck engine. The KA24E — single cam, 140 hp, shared with the Hardbody pickup — was Nissan USA's concession to torque and emissions, and enthusiasts never quite forgave it. Didn't matter. Under the sheetmetal sat the same multilink rear, the same near-perfect balance, and pop-up headlights on the fastback. America got the best-handling cheap rear-drive coupe on sale and spent a decade not noticing.

Then drifting crossed the Pacific. When Formula Drift launched in 2004, the 240SX was the default answer — cheap, rear-drive, with a JDM parts catalog of SR20DETs, brakes, and subframes that bolted straight in. The 'SR swap' became American tuning shorthand, and missile-car culture chewed through the population: swapped, drifted, walled, parted out. The KA-T crowd fought a noble rearguard action turbocharging the truck motor, which turned out to be shockingly stout.

The result is a mass-produced car with unicorn survivors. Hundreds of thousands were sold; stock, straight, uncut examples now round to zero. Bring a Trailer treats a bone-stock hatchback like an exotic, and prices key almost entirely on condition and originality — the market's way of admitting that every 240SX was somebody's project except the handful that are now worth real money.