Nissan Silvia (S12)
Why 7.5: The RS-X grade carries the FJ20ET — the same iron-block, four-valve, twin-cam two-litre Nissan built for the DR30 Skyline and homologated for Group A — in a 1,170 kg rear-drive coupé with pop-up headlights. The S12 sits between the S110 and the S13 and is ignored by the people who care about both, which is exactly why the survivors have miles on them.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
The FJ20ET is a big-bore iron-block twin-cam built for homologation rather than economy, and it has a hard mechanical edge under boost the SR20 that replaced it never found. But it stops at 6,400 rpm and the turbocharger sits between it and you. Ahead of the S13 and S14, level with the 180SX and a shade behind the S15 — short of memorable.
4-cylinder · turbocharged · 6,400 rpm redline · rated 5.2 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €10k (1985) → €12k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Built before ISOFIX existed, so there are no anchor points at all. A child seat here is a seatbelt installation, and the belt geometry of the period was not designed with one in mind.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
Nissan sold the S12 under three names and almost nobody remembers any of them. In Japan it was the Silvia and, through a second dealer chain, the Gazelle. In Europe it stayed a Silvia except in Sweden, where Nissan renamed it the 180ZX rather than share a name with the queen, and in America it was the 200SX. The engine bay took whatever each market would pay for: a carburetted CA20 in the cheap cars, the FJ20E and FJ20ET twin-cams in the Japanese RS and RS-X, a CA18DET that replaced the FJ outright in 1987 and quietly previewed how the next Silvia would be powered, and — only in America — a three-litre VG30E V6, which is how a car designed around a four-cylinder ended up with a Maxima engine in its nose. What none of those versions ever acquired was a reputation. The S110 before it had given Nissan the 240RS rally car and the S13 after it effectively invented a motorsport, and the S12 sat in between being a competent, slightly heavy, slightly wallowy coupé on semi-trailing arms. Rust did the rest, because there is no restoration industry for a car nobody photographs. That is precisely what shapes the ownership picture. Nothing about an S12 rewards storage: values sat below scrap money for two decades and have only recently ticked up as the last clean cars surface out of Japan, and the people buying now are overwhelmingly the ones who wanted one at seventeen and could not afford to insure it.