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.

What this means if you’re importing

Retail listings are the visible top of the market — dealer-prepped cars for domestic buyers. Export purchases usually come from auction, cheaper but sight-unseen. The medians and quartiles above are your calibration: an export quote well under Q1 isn’t automatically a bargain, it’s a question (“why is this car cheap?”) that deserves an answer with photos. Next month’s Market Check measures how these numbers move — against today’s archived raw data.