-
Nissan CEO confirms: nobody under 65 has bought a New Z yet
Company reportedly overwhelmed by hundreds of sales per year
This is Collector Car TL;DR: a weekly recap of what happened on Collector Car Feed, plus car auctions, listings, automotive news, and other things of interest to the average CCF Enjoyer, and you can get it weekly by giving me your email address.
The Videos
Honda Civic situation on Facebook is crazy
It’s CCF Nation’s second-favorite gameshow: The Price is Wrong (PiW), and today it’s all Hondas. In PiW, contestants guess the asking prices of Facebook Marketplace listings, with the asking price increasing every round. The closest without going over receives the asking price in points; on nice episodes like this one, the two highest scoring players face off in a Showcase Showdown.
His Subaru blew up on their first date and she ghosted him
Netgear tells a tale of woe. Is it possible this is only the first date ruined by his brother’s WRX?
If you modify the bank’s car, you will never pay it off.
More poverty content: cars with “money still owed”. How far in the hole can you be on a G37 sedan in 2026? We investigate.The News
Pray the Gray Away: Experts Say More People Want Brightly Colored Cars
“…the market share of colored car paints has increased by [ALMOST TWO PERCENT LMAO] in recent years.“
I’ve been seeing more colorful cars out on the road lately; particularly many, many Eruption Green Broncos and Bronco Sports. It’s a great color. But yeah, two percent. It’s up two percent. Everything is still white, black, gray, silver.
The Nissan Z Is Thriving Thanks to an Unlikely Hero: Your Parents
“We’re getting a lot of older buyers coming and buying this car, as a trophy car, a retirement car, whatever else,” Nissan America’s boss exclusively told The Drive.
For some reason, The Drive is reporting that Nissan is… bragging…? that the only people buying Zs are nostalgic boomers. The title says the Z is “thriving”, but Nissan sold 5,487 Zs in the United States in all of 2025, its third year in production. Compare that to the 350Z, which sold 36,728 units on introduction in 2003.
“Oh, but CCF, it’s unfair to compare the 350Z’s inaugural model year to some random mid-generation year,” you’ll say. Well, that’s more Zs than Nissan sold in 2023 and 2024 combined. So I guess that’s thriving, in a way, if your expectations are absolutely through the floor because you’re Nissan and your CEO fled the country in a big box.
A New Chevy Camaro Will Join Buick and Cadillac Sedans
GM is building a new Camaro, and it’s going to be assembled in the United States, which hasn’t really been a GM move for quite some time (even with that big bailout). I can’t find a solid source on this news: Car And Driver links to Auto News, who cites “a source”. This is a real “trust me guys,” but it sure is believable. They claim production will start in 2027.
Kia unveils midsize pickup plan for North America in pursuit of Toyota Tacoma and Ford Ranger
Kia’s CEO said they’re going to sell a midsize pickup in the United States by 2030. It’s going to be an EV with or without a gas generator. The Tacoma and Ranger are just in the title for engagement, because those trucks have fans.Honda Drivers Now Have to Pay a Subscription to Open Their Garage Door
So this article is about a Reddit thread in which the author states Honda has “moved the garage door opener from a button on the mirror to a paywall subscription service”. And that sounds downright terrible. This garnered thousands of angry comments damning Honda and their dystopian plot, comparing them to BMW’s pay-to-play heated seats subscription drama.But ultimately, this entire article and the thread it’s based on were just misinformed clickbait. OP was describing a Homelink mirror, which was never standard on Hondas. It was an option, and it still is: it’s $461 in the Honda Passport configurator. OP is just an angry cheapskate.
It has been a very slow news week.
The Cars
2003 Ford Focus SVT
This one ends in just a few hours. It leaks oil from everywhere it can, has numerous minor body issues, has two accidents on record, has 165,000 miles, and is being sold by someone who bought it approximately one year ago (this is a red flag write it down), but even still, these are just Y2K perfection. There’s nothing here not to like other than all that stuff I said.
2005 Porsche Cayenne Turbo
They keep selling these “Transsyberia tributes” on Cars and Bids for what looks like good money. I don’t know anything about Porsche Cayennes, but this is a 200,000 mile 20 year old hood missile. It’s the nice one, but still, 200K. This has to be worthless, right?
1998 BMW M3 Coupe
76K original miles on an E36 M3 is pretty remarkable, but…
2001 BMW M3 Convertible
…This one’s only three years newer and has a TENTH of the miles. 7,100 on the clock. It’s even Laguna Seca Blue. Shame about that roof though.
1990 Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo
The low-mileage streak continues with this Z32TT (67,000 on the odometer). I think it’s just the early ones like this that have the guts made entirely out of S13 door card insert material. It has the same non-airbag steering wheel as the S13 also. If you’re wondering, like me, why the 300ZX didn’t have automatic seatbelts while also having no airbag, it’s because they mounted the seatbelts to the doors instead of the B pillar, allowing you to just leave them buckled all the time, making them automatic. They added a driver side airbag in 1992, and then in 1994 added a passenger one as well and moved the belts to the B pillar. Anyway, these are starting to take off in price, and this auction won’t help potential buyers: expect big money on it.
1999 Toyota RAV4 Convertible
Two door first gen Rav4s are just cute as hell. Five speed too. Great seat pattern. 121K isn’t bad either. This one sold on Cars and Bids last month for $9600, and the buyer backed out. Read the comments on both: people are claiming it’s loaded up with rust even though it’s a Florida car, then you see it has a NJ title, and it’s being sold on behalf of someone by “CARWOWMIAMI”… some chump is about to get hosed here (allegedly/in my opinion), so follow this auction and see how bad it gets.The Doug’s Take Drama Continues
Looks like some character is karma-farming on Doug N Bids with a fake Doug’s Take meme account. Good for him.
Look at the comment history from just a few days here. Then, imagine Doug DeMuro sitting down and writing that much every day for years. Has Doug ever publicly stated that Cars & Bids was just using his name and obviously Doug wasn’t actually writing a paragraph on every auction car?The End
I sent out all the prizes from all previous CCF newsletters this week. I took zero duplicate winners, so I was able to send EVERYONE the same Scion Sampler CD. Winners, please enjoy Volume 23. Did you get yours? I’ve been listening to it all week. Maybe we’re listening to it at the same time, and at night, if we both look at the moon…
Update on the Recaros: I like them. Some smug Canadian told me when I posted about them on Instagram that all Fiesta STs in Canada got them, that they weren’t an option like they were here in the US. He is right to be smug, just this once. The confidence boost these give you in your driving ability is downright dangerous.
But the junkyard I bought them from kind of screwed me. I bought a 2015 driver seat and 2014 passenger and rear. They had both in the same yard. The 2015 driver seat looked a lot cleaner, but the passenger seat was blown. The 2014 had a full set but the driver seat looked a little beat compared to the 2015. It’s one of those places where they pull for you. Full service. But they pulled the full set out of the 2014 and gave it to me without saying anything, and I, like a sucker, did not notice until I was cleaning them hundreds of miles away. Whenever you spend money on anything car-related, triple check every possible variable, because everybody out here is trying to chisel you.
This week a lucky Collector Car Feed mailing list subscriber read this early and won a stack of DVDs I found in my basement. It could have been you!
See you Soon™.
-Feed -
Big if True: World’s First 10 Second Honda For Sale
Today’s staff pick is an actual piece of import tuning history. Today we take a look at the Silver Bullet Honda CRX, currently up on Facebook Marketplace for “trades and cash 30k range”.
This CRX, originally owned by David Shih, has spent the last 22 years untouched as part of a private collection in Monroe, Louisiana. Shih was interviewed by Honda Tuning Magazine about his historic feat in which he piloted the little B18 powered sport compact to the world’s first ten second quarter mile pass in a Honda, posting 10.87 at 136 miles per hour, all the way back in 1996.
This is truly a piece of automotive history. This car can be credited with kicking off the tuner craze of the late 90s and early 00s, leading into the creation of the Fast and the Furious franchise, American Products Company, Super Street Magazine (which coincidentally also started in 1996), and so many other things we’ve come to love in hindsight here at Collector Car Feed. $30,000 for this historic milestone almost feels like theft.
-
Site Update: Daily Deals Revamped
If you haven’t taken a look at Daily Deals in a minute, I don’t blame you. Where are the deals?
Up until now, the Daily Deals post has been a collection of all cars found in the past 24 hours with less than 100,000 miles on the odometer. The idea was maybe this would help you find a low mileage Bring A Trailer darling to flip.
Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with 10+ year old cars, limiting to a hundred thousand miles rules out the vast majority, and what if you’re not necessarily looking for a cherry example? What if you just want to get behind the wheel of a 240SX or 4Runner and don’t really care about the number on the odometer?
Daily Deals has been reworked. Now instead of limiting by mileage, it shows everything we’ve found in the past 24 hours (and will soon include live auction listings). To help make sense of the mess, I’ve added labels to standout listings, both positive and negative. There’s a 1-5 dollar sign price rating, markers for low and high mileage, and a quick warning if the price or mileage looks fake. The price and mileage labels are model-specific: previously, anything under 100k was considered “low mileage”. Now, low and high mileage labels are based on the mileage of all similar vehicles I’ve found in the past six months. The same is true of price labels. Everything is based on similar vehicle data instead of arbitrary numbers.
Our goal here has always been helping you find a good deal, and I think this is a massive step forward in living up to it. This functionality will be added to the forum pages as well in the near future, along with some other tweaks and new features. This site is never “finished”, there’s always something else to fix or improve.
Anyway, the YouTube channel needs subs, so smash that bell or whatever.
-Feed
-
Z Odyssey, Part 2: Ship (Doesn’t) Happen(s), A Donkey Show, and Love at First Sight
I’d found the car I wanted, but, coming from across the country, how would I buy it? With everyone and their uncle leery of wire transfers thanks to the numerous Nigerian princes out there, I had to come up with a way to get my money in the seller’s hands without having him being scared of getting ripped off. Any banker in their right mind would warn him against accepting a wire transfer. I could always mail him a check, but then I’d be vulnerable if he backed out. I considered putting the money into an escrow account, which is common, but that would take time: time I didn’t have, since I was on both the seller and my friend’s schedules.
Golf, it turns out, would be the Klonopin all three of us would need to ease the anxiety. My friend Pat works for the golf course at Mammoth Lakes, CA, and the seller was a golf pro at his local resort. Once the two of them made the connection, it was smooth sailing from there. I wired the money directly to his bank, but the tellers warned him of the potential scam. He shrugged it off and put faith in me and Pat. He was $7000 richer, and I was $7000 poorer, with the title to a 1972 240Z. I kept in contact with the seller over the next few days, as transfers can take time. I wanted him to be sure that this wasn’t a scam and that the money was transferred.
Pat made the 4 hour trek back with my new pride and joy while I started contacting shipping companies to get it loaded onto a trailer to ship back east. This turned out to be a nightmare. Transport companies tend to just accept whatever job they can within a reasonable price range, regardless of the location of the vehicle. I had multiple carriers accept the job, wait a few days to a week, call me to arrange pick up, realize the location sucked, and then cancel on me. It was Thanksgiving , and time wasn’t doing me any favors either, as roads and winter storms could disable travel at any time.
After a few weeks of waiting, I wondered if I should just try and drive it home. I started researching flights and found a few decent fares. I talked with my wife to see what she thought of me embarking on this journey, and she was 100% supportive. I waffled for a couple days on the decision, since I figured I would need a two week lead time to make the flight prices work. As luck would have it, I was finally going to pull a sort of scam on Frontier. Frontier was offering $48 one way flights to Vegas. I could leave the next day for fifty bucks and start the journey. If you aren’t aware of Frontier, they nickel and dime you for everything. You want to choose your seat? That’s an extra fifteen bucks. You want to bring a carry-on item? That’s an extra fifty bucks. You want to use the bathroom, ten bucks. I might be the first person to make that flight for the advertised price. I was planning on packing light anyways, so this was more of an incentive. I shoved everything I would need to bring with me in a “personal item” sized backpack. With 30 hours notice, I was on my way to Vegas with only a backpack and a one-way rental car destined for MMH airport in Mammoth Lakes.
I arrived in Vegas at 1 AM on Friday, December 1, 2017. I wasn’t hassled one bit from Frontier, which honestly surprised me, as I figured they would try and nickel and dime me at any opportunity. I got about 4 hours of “plane sleep” on my flight; that kind of sleep where you’re partially awake and partially asleep at the same time. Where you’re constantly entering and leaving consciousness. As I had a long drive ahead of me, any sleep I got was better than none.
I got to my Enterprise rental car at about 1:30 AM and embarked on the five hour drive to Mammoth. I stopped at the infamous Alien Highway rest stop off of Route 95 north of Vegas, and was bemused to see that they had an alien brothel. If I had more time, was single, and desperate, I might have walked in just to see what it was all about.
In between Mammoth and Vegas is nothing but highway, a small town, and a few brothels. I made it to the small town of Beatty around 4 AM. I was starting to get a little tired, and thought I saw something in the middle of the road. It wasn’t an alien, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t two donkeys crossing the street. They didn’t acknowledge or flinch as I came to a quick halt about 10 feet away. I had seen wild horses crossing the road when I previously lived out here, but never wild donkeys. I wasn’t sure if that was an omen, but I pushed on regardless. I made it to Pat’s house in Mammoth at about 6:30 AM.
I finally got to see her after weeks of waiting. Pat had gotten busy tearing her down a little bit to prep her for the trip. The original radio was long gone and she had been spliced open (Dash Panel had been hacked apart) to store an antiquated aftermarket CD player. I say store, because the head unit wasn’t even connected to power or the speakers. If you’re going to make a trip across country, you have to have music. And it’s sad to say, but if I was going to go from Mammoth to Northern VA, I needed tunes or else I didn’t think I could make it. He had also wired up the cigarette lighter so I could charge my phone for the trip.
We buttoned her up so I could take her out for a quick test drive and stop by the local NAPA auto parts to get a few needed items. The clutch was slipping under load in 3rd, 4th, and 5th but once you got above 3500 rpm, she would hold and pull all the way to 6k, which is short of redline. I wasn’t ready to push her that high yet. This 240 had a L28 paired with a 5 speed transmission which was perfect for highway cruising. It still had the stock 240Z secondary cylinder adjustment rod, so I was hoping to make some adjustments to get rid of the slipping clutch. Would it work? Tune in next time to find out!
