The cars I recall most fondly were neither the prettiest nor the quickest. Certainly not the most expensive. They were machines that emerged willfully peculiar and intractably idiosyncratic.
From the May/June 2026 issue of Car and Driver. If life resembles a three-act play—I'm not insisting it does—Nissan's 240SX at least resembled my own life: A wobbly toddlerhood, in which you wet your pants while groveling for Fudgsicles. A fecund adulthood, in which you're never late for work and begin cheating on your taxes. And a hoary senescence, in which you scream at the neighbors' kids and wet your pants again.
Act One: Introduced in 1988, the first Nissan 240SX was short on oomph and long on thrash. Cute but undercooked.
View Price on AmazonAct Two: For 1991 came double overhead cams (instead of a single) and four valves per cylinder (rather than three). With the engine making 155 horsepower, escape velocity still wasn't bank-robber worthy, but the cylinder head certainly sharpened throttle response.
Act Three: By 1995, U.S. drivers had begun shunning small coupes and hatchbacks, and the skies would soon dump upon us a pestilence of SUVs. Nissan juked backward with a 240SX styled more like its Japan-market Silvia coupe. Off the menu: all-star balance. On it: white gravy.
In a three-act play, the middle is usually the apricot jam in the Sacher torte. And so it was that the Act Two car warmed hearts. Power, of course, was funneled to the rear wheels, where a clever multilink suspension and four-wheel steering held sway. Or lack of sway. That optional rear-wheel steering helped the Nissan stand out among its peers: the Toyota Celica, the Honda Prelude, the Eagle Talon, the Ford Probe, the Mitsubishi Eclipse, and the VW Corrado.
What really pried open checkbooks was the 240SX's flat, neutral handling. Like a jai alai pelota, the car didn't mind being hurled, tossed, pitched, flung, and lobbed. To an abusive hand, it responded not in kind but with grace. A 53.0/47.0 percent front-to-rear weight distribution meant the 240SX became almost obligatory among the then-aborning Japanese drifters.
By the time the tire-melting trend infiltrated California, the 240SX's bona fides had swollen into really big fides. Drifters solved the dearth of power via lampshade-size aftermarket turbos that poked through sliced-open hoods like periscopes.
Source: caranddriver.com
