JP Market Check #2: The Levin Closes on the Trueno (Aug 2026)

Last month we counted the whole market instead of guessing at it: 484 priced drift chassis on Goo-net, the portal Japanese buyers actually shop. This is the point of doing it monthly. We ran the same crawl again on 21 August 2026 — same eight model pages, same rules — and counted 470 priced cars. Now the numbers can move, and we can show you which ones did.

Method, unchanged: every page of every model’s listings, each car’s vehicle price (本体価格), “price on request” cars excluded, medians and quartiles computed from the full set. Both censuses are archived, so nothing here is a recollection.

What moved in a month

Every chassis we track is flat or up. Nothing fell. But the interesting part is not the direction — it is that the movement is concentrated in two chassis, and one of them is the one Market Check #1 called the cheap way in.

The Levin is closing on the Trueno

July’s census produced the finding readers argued with most: two mechanically similar cars, a ¥2M gap. The Trueno sat at a ¥5.37M median and the Levin at ¥3.38M — a premium for pop-up headlights and the paint job every Initial D reader grew up on.

A month later the Trueno has not moved (¥5.39M, +0.4%) and the Levin is up 9.0% to ¥3.69M. The gap between them has fallen from ¥1.99M to ¥1.71M.

Look inside the Levin range and it is a market tightening, not a spike. The upper quartile actually came down, ¥4.68M to ¥4.30M, while the lower quartile rose ¥2.89M to ¥2.99M. The cheap Levins are being bought; what is left clusters higher. A mid-month census we ran on 12 August caught the chassis at ¥3.64M — between the two readings — so this is a month of steady movement rather than one odd listing day.

The Levin is still the same car for roughly Silvia money. It is just less of a secret than it was in July.

The S13 is thinning, not appreciating

The S13 median is identical to July’s: ¥3.80M. Ignore it and read the count instead.

Ten priced cars left the market in a month — a 17% drop, the steepest of any chassis here — and the floor rose ¥290k. Only 13 of the 48 priced S13s in the country now ask under ¥3M. A flat median with a rising floor and a shrinking count is what a chassis looks like when the cheap examples are going and no new ones arrive to replace them. The S13 stopped production in 1993; this is the shape of that.

The JZX100 keeps climbing, the 90 has stopped entirely

The JZX100 Chaser is up again, ¥4.19M to ¥4.35M, and its floor moved with it: the cheapest priced Chaser in Japan went from ¥1.39M to ¥1.60M. It still out-prices every Silvia generation, S13 included.

The JZX90 gives us the flattest data point we have ever published: four priced cars in July, four in August, at identical prices — ¥0.98M, ¥1.33M, ¥2.83M and ¥3.86M. Not four similar cars. The same four, unsold, a month apart. If a 90 is the chassis you want, retail is not where it will come from.

The S14 stayed put — and gained cars

Everything else on the list lost listings. The S14 gained seven priced cars (63 → 70) and its median moved ¥17k, which is nothing. It sits at ¥2.88M with a tight middle 50% of ¥2.49M–¥3.38M, roughly ¥920k under an S13, ¥790k under an S15 and ¥1.47M under a JZX100.

Two months of census data now say the same thing: the S14 is the value entry to a Japanese drift chassis, and unlike the Levin, its price has not started catching up.

One thing to understand about every number above

These are retail prices — Japan’s general used-car market, where a dealer buys at auction, reconditions the car, adds margin and a warranty, and sells it to a Japanese buyer. 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 the retail stock comes from, and private sales inside the drift community — cars offered around the paddock before they ever reach a listing site. Buying there means giving up the showroom prep. That is the trade: less polish, better money.

The catch has always been that this layer needs eyes on the car. So we are your eyes. We inspect it here and send you a full video and photo walkthrough — underside, chassis rails, engine bay, a cold start — before you commit a single yen. Tell us the chassis and the budget and we will tell you, against these census numbers, what is realistic below retail this month and what is not: find and export a car with us.

Market Check #3 measures against today’s archive.