JP Market Check #1: What S13, S14 & S15 Cost in Japan (Jul 2026)

“PRICE: ASK” tells you nothing. So we counted the whole market: every priced listing on Goo-net — the portal where Japanese buyers actually shop — for the chassis that matter to drifters. Not a sample, not page one: a census of 484 cars, checked on July 21, 2026.

Method, in one line: we crawled every page of each model’s listings, took each car’s vehicle price (本体価格), excluded “price on request” cars, and computed medians and quartiles from the full set. Raw data is archived so Market Check #2 can measure real movement.

Silvia: the three-generation picture

The S14 is the value play, full stop. Its median sits roughly ¥1M under the S13’s, its ceiling is the lowest of the three, and half of all S14s cluster in a tight ¥2.58–3.40M band. The chassis the internet spent two decades calling the unloved middle child is now the cheapest real S-chassis by a wide margin.

The S13 premium is bigger than a first look suggests. A ¥3.80M median for a car that stopped production in 1993, with the top end reaching ¥9.99M for the best survivors. Age has thinned the herd and priced the clean cars accordingly.

The S15 is plentiful and polarised. Deepest supply by far — 151 listings — and the widest spread in this census: ¥1.44M rough cars to an ¥11.5M outlier. The middle 50% (¥2.88–4.55M) is where realistic buying happens.

180SX: with the S15, not above it

86 priced listings put the 180SX median at ¥3.61M (Q1–Q3: ¥2.96–4.02M, range ¥1.78–7.00M) — essentially level with the S15 and below the S13. Site-quoted averages run higher (Type X money pulls the mean up), but the median tells the truer story: the hatch is priced with its Silvia siblings, not above them.

AE86 and the JZX brothers

The census settles the AE86 question with a twist: it’s really two markets. Truenos carry a ¥5.37M median — more than half the cars ask over ¥5M — while the mechanically-similar Levin sits at ¥3.38M. That’s roughly a ¥2M premium for pop-up headlights and the panda paint job every Initial D reader grew up on. If you want the chassis rather than the poster, the Levin is the same car for Silvia money.

The JZX numbers hold two findings. The JZX100 is quietly expensive: at a ¥4.19M median it out-prices every Silvia generation. And the JZX90 has all but left Japanese retail — four cars nationwide, ¥0.98M to ¥3.86M. If a 90 is your dream chassis, the auction hall is where it will have to come from.

Methodology note (Jul 21): this article initially quoted first-page medians, then a cross-site spot-check, before we built the full crawl the same day. The census versions above supersede both — and amusingly, they vindicate the first AE86 read: the Trueno really is a ¥5M-class car. It was the Levin hiding underneath the “AE86” label that made the market look cheaper. All future Market Checks use the census method.

One thing to understand about every number above

These are retail prices — Japan’s general used-car market, where dealers buy at auction, recondition the car, add their margin and a warranty, and sell to domestic buyers. Retail is the ceiling of this market, not the floor.

The same chassis also change hands where these listings never look: the dealer auction halls retail stock comes from, and private sales inside the drift community — cars that get offered around the paddock before they ever reach a listing site. Buying there means giving up the showroom prep — that’s the trade: less polish, better money.

The catch has always been that this layer requires eyes on the car. So we’re your eyes: we check the car in person and send you a full video and photo walkthrough — underside, chassis rails, the parts a listing would crop out — before you commit a single yen. Tell us the chassis and your budget, and we’ll tell you honestly, with these census numbers as the reference, what’s realistic below retail and what isn’t: Find & export a car with us »

Next month’s Market Check measures how these numbers move — against today’s archived raw data.