S2000 vs Skyline vs Silvia: personal experience?
 

A young coworker of mine is in the market for an S2000. He's been shopping pretty hard this last year, and dead-set on a bone stock white AP2. Recently he's begun looking at the RHD Skylines and Silvias. He's a little hesitant about driving a RHD car, but some of those cars look like relative bargains compared to a clean AP2. Personally I know almost nothing about the Nissans.

Any firsthand insights into how these cars compare as daily drivers?

Had a RHD for a couple years. Pain in the ass. Left hand turns at intersections are a nuisance. Drive throughs are a nuisance. I ground 3rd shifting hard more than I liked. Around here cops hassle you waaay more in a RHD. Had one try to give me an inspection ticket arbitrarily, pulling me over for no reason and no traffic violation. Wasn't too happy when I pointed out the current inspection certificate sticker on my windshield. Right in front of him.

Don't recommend.

Also most of the cheap Skylines aren't GTRs. And if it's not a GTR, what's the point?

Aren't they semi-illegal in WA, too? They're full on legal here, but cops are still ****s about them in Vancouver, BC.

Importing a car? Only if your handy with a wrench and the internet. A lot of cars being imported here will eventually need parts, which will have to be sent from overseas.
Expect a lot of things to go wrong and have a lot of money on the side to properly support such a thing. It sounds like he wouldn't be buying the most top notch example.

Is this a daily driver or a project? If he knows his cars, then he could pull off importing a car as a daily, but it's risky business. If it's a project car, then go nuts!

Being fully dependent on a car that is difficult to source parts for and even hard to find mechanics to work on isn't an easy task, nor really wise at all.

Edit: Biggest pet peeve for importing a car is that you have to go through auctions and essentially never see or touch the car before buying it. Not meeting the owner means you can't find out if the car was beaten to death or properly taken car of, when it comes to used "sporty" cars-that's a big deal. I know the internet loves to write off importing cars as an easy carefree process in the recent months, but it's scary.

Nah, most of the ones in WA come from Canada. Bellingham and Vancouver, BC(where most JDM cars come in from) are super close. To get them registered here they need to meet an out of Province safety inspection. And I think the importing loophole for WA relies on Canadian registration. There's lots of them here, and he could probably arrange a bunch of test drives and come up on a weekend. Parts aren't that bad in the community either.

For me it was the daily driving nuisances and **** cops that were my reasons for going back to a normal LHD car.

Ah, i assumed it was going to be imported from Japan.

Most of us don't have the luxury of going to the land of Canada and test driving them. :bellyroll:

1989 car legal in states... a 25yo car vs a car half that age. Same price...

RHD is cool at car shows, but as others have pointed out, a pain in a LHD country. Also, harder to service/maintain simply due to parts and mechanics familiar with it. Reliability... it's 25years old. Could be reliable but you better know how to fix things yourself. Also, be prepared to make sure everything is legal in terms of mods... else police will be all over you.

Hopefully he doesn't work at the mall? Was there on Tuesday and it was dead empty and thought a tumbleweed rolled past in the horizon. I'm going to put myself on a limb but a well maintained S2000 should always be worth 10g's.

The Silvia makes by far the best espresso out of the three, but the other two are way faster on the track.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...L._SL1500_.jpg

Owned Skylines and Silvias for years. Great cars, but the amount of BS to rock one stateside? Nope.

I had a r33 skyline for over 6 years. Best car I ever owned! Parts are easy to come by as most of them have US counterparts or tons of people with swapped cars that buy the same parts so most the online companies stateside have them. They are easy to work on and are a Blast to drive. I wouldn't bother with a silvia unless its a s15 which are illegal here too, You CAN get around easily, I never had any problems driving a RHD car except trying to pass semi's on 1 lane roads. That made for some slow trips through mountains :-P GTR's are fun and all, but I'd Prefer RWD so my GTS-T was perfect for me. I did a lot of drift, autox, track days with it and it held up really well. Never left me stranded and got more attention with fan boys then I preferred but still was funny to see peoples reaction when they realized it was RHD. Everywhere you go people will take pictures and talk to you about it, its fun for a few weeks, gets really old after years, but still, I wouldn't trade those 6 years with that beast for anything. I would do it again for sure!

Oh and I have had s2000, skyline, and 240sx w/ sr20 swaps.... Skyline the most fun, s2000's are really fun cruisers, 240 was easy to mod and have fun with, and super cheap to do whatever form of racing you prefer.

25 year old Nissans vs. 10 year old Honda.

Unless he has a serious hard-on for the Nissan the answer is very obvious, those are not cars you casually pick up, they are very nearly classics at this point with maintenance and reliability issues to match.

All will be abused

Used my S2K as a daily driver for a year. It's doable, but I am a single dude, with no pets, or excess baggage... I can fit everything I own in the car and drove it cross country many times with the top down. Takes a special person to pull it off while actually liking it. It's hard to find an OEM one that hasn't been ragged out... I picked mine up while I was selling for Honda, and it came in on trade from an old Japanese lady, and I bet VTEC was hardly ever cracked in it, so decided to pick it up.

Times got harry a few occasions driving on ice, and charging up the Rockies on the way to ski-resorts.

But as for the reliability... it's a no brainer...

Nissans are nice and all, but more moving parts + turbos, and being older, I hope you have a trustworthy shop, or have to tools and skills/friends to help you work on your own car, then it could be very rewarding.

Not only would it be a pain to wait for parts to come in for an import even if you were mechanically inclined but how do you know you would even like it? Before I lived in Japan I ate into the hype.

"Skyline! OMG AWESOME!"

Then I drove one. It drives like any other car, absolutely nothing special about it. Granted, it wasn't a GTR, but then again if you go for a GTR... having to service that over here? Shittt no!

If he's able to import a JZX100 Chaser, I'd do that in a second. Favorite car. Gobs of power, sporty sedan, plenty of room, looks incredible.