New York, New York. So good they named it twice. If we judged cars’ greatness merely by the number of monikers they held, this one would be an all-time great. Versions of the car in the title shot have gone by 180SX, 200SX, 240SX, ‘Sileighty’ and the model codes PS13, RPD13, and RS13U. They are all based on Nissan’s S13 platform (as was its JDM sister car, the Silvia S13) and are all, more-or-less, the same car. To keep things simple, we’re going to go by the name under which it was sold in the UK – 200SX.
Nissan in the mid-to-late 1980s was on a hell of a roll. The Japanese bubble economy was yet to deflate. Heels were high and hemlines even higher in Tokyo’s party districts, money was cheap, the struggle to pull Japan out of post-war poverty almost forgotten, and the sensible 1990s were far away. 2000AD was just a comic featuring Judge Dredd. Nissan’s engineers let rip with all the latest tech – cheap microprocessors, relatively powerful CAD programs, and the first computer-aided-engineering simulations that these days would be oversold as ‘digital twins’, probably with the magic letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ tagged on.
In my far-from-expert expert opinion, I happen to think that the Nissan Design studios were also going through a bit of a Golden Age. Fifteen years before Ghosn-san would poach a young Shiro Nakamura from Isuzu to revive Nissan’s dull-as-ditchwater styling, Nissan’s designers in Hon-Atsugi and San Diego were producing some belting shapes. Now, I have this theory that design studios go through natural cycles. Other Ti contributors far more expert than I will probably shoot this down as balderdash, but I think they are a little bit like bands – car makers tend to hire a young rock-star head of design, usually from a rival brand having cut his (rarely ‘hers’, sadly) teeth there, and let them off the leash as the board that hired them fully support their ideas – often, churlishly, scorning the work of the previous incumbent. They then have a period – maybe five to seven years – where creativity matches corporate confidence in their ideas, and they can actually produce some great work.
