The Datsun Collectors Overlooked Until It Was Too Late

Walk into any American dealership in 1972 and you could drive home a brand-new Datsun 240Z for right around $3,500. That was less than many buyers were spending on a loaded Ford Torino or a Chevelle with the right option boxes checked. The muscle car era was still roaring, and anything that didn't come with a V8 and a set of wide tires was considered a consolation prize. Datsun occupied a strange middle ground in the American market. The cars weren't quite cheap enough to be purely utilitarian and weren't quite flashy enough to compete with Detroit's performance machines. Buyers who wanted economy bought Volkswagens. Buyers who wanted performance bought American. Datsuns — along with the 510 sedan, the little Roadster, and the compact trucks — fell into a gap that most people didn't think much about. That indifference had consequences. Because the cars were affordable and plentiful, nobody treated them as anything worth preserving. They were driven hard, maintained minimally, and replaced without ceremony. The idea that a 240Z or a 510 wagon might one day sit in a climate-controlled garage with a six-figure price tag attached would have seemed like a bad joke to most buyers at the time.

The 1990s were brutal for surviving Datsuns. Parts were still cheap and plentiful enough that there was no reason to hunt for a good used body panel — you just bought new. And because the cars had no collector cachet, nobody was pulling them out of fields or paying to have them properly stored. They sat. They rusted. Eventually, most of them were crushed. The Datsun 1600 Roadster tells that story better than almost any other model. Built between 1967 and 1970, it was a genuinely charming two-seat convertible with a twin-cam engine that punched well above its displacement. But the rocker panels on those cars rusted catastrophically — not just surface rust, but structural rot that made restoration prohibitively expensive for anyone who wasn't deeply committed. By the late 1990s, finding a solid 1600 Roadster had become nearly impossible. The model came within a few years of functional extinction. The 510 and early Z-cars fared somewhat better, but not dramatically so. Tens of thousands were scrapped during that decade. Restoration shops that worked on Japanese cars from that era describe the 1990s as the period when survival window closed on a huge percentage of the remaining population. What made it through was largely luck — a dry climate, a careful owner, or a barn that happened to stay dry.

Here's what most American buyers never knew: the Datsun 240Z wasn't designed to be cheap transportation. It was designed to win races. In 1971, a factory-backed 240Z driven by Edgar Herrmann and Hans Schuller won the East African Safari Rally outright — one of the most demanding long-distance rallies in the world, run over roads that destroyed purpose-built competition cars. The 240Z didn't just finish. It won. The 510 sedan had its own motorsport story. In SCCA Trans-Am competition, the 510 — a small, boxy four-door that looked like it belonged in a grocery store parking lot — became a genuine threat to far more expensive machinery. Its independent rear suspension and well-balanced chassis gave it handling that American sedans of the era simply couldn't match. BRE Racing, the Southern California team that campaigned the 510, took back-to-back class championships in 1971 and 1972. This racing history is part of why the collector market eventually came around. Once enthusiasts started digging into the engineering behind these cars — the double-wishbone front suspension on the Z, the fully independent setup on the 510 — the "cheap economy car" narrative fell apart. These were serious machines built by engineers who understood what made a car rewarding to drive, priced accessibly because Datsun was still fighting for American market share.

The shift started quietly around the mid-2000s. Baby Boomers who had driven 510s to college or bought a used 240Z as their first real sports car were reaching their peak earning years, and the nostalgia was starting to translate into action. Online forums — early ones, the kind with plain white backgrounds and slow load times — became gathering places for people hunting survivor cars and sharing restoration notes. Collectors describe a pattern that played out again and again in those years: a rough 240Z picked up for a few hundred dollars at an estate sale, needing floors, a carburetor rebuild, and a full respray, but with a straight body and matching numbers. After a careful restoration, cars like that could appraise for tens of thousands. That kind of return wasn't lost on people paying attention. Word spread fast in the Datsun community. Classified ads that once went unanswered started generating calls within hours. Barn finds that would have been parted out a decade earlier were suddenly worth trucking home intact. The cars hadn't changed — the market's understanding of them had. Collectors who had spent years being told their hobby was a dead end watched prices climb and kept buying, because they'd known something the broader market was just beginning to figure out.

The 240Z has seen the sharpest climb of any Datsun model. Clean, unmodified examples with matching numbers were trading in the $8,000–$12,000 range at auction in the early 2000s. Today, those same cars routinely fetch $40,000 to $70,000, with exceptional low-mileage survivors pushing past that ceiling. A 1971 240Z in factory-correct condition sold at a major auction house in 2022 for just over $100,000 — a number that would have seemed impossible to anyone who remembered these cars rusting in driveways. The 510 wagon tells a different but equally striking story. For years it was the unwanted stepchild of the Datsun lineup — too small to be practical, too plain to be exciting. By 2010 a decent example might bring $4,000. Today, clean wagons regularly clear $20,000, and the rarest two-door 510 sedans with documented racing provenance have gone higher. For comparison, a 1971 Ford Mustang fastback in similar condition has appreciated over the same period — but the percentage gains on the Datsun side have outpaced it. That's the nature of a market playing catch-up. The Mustang's value was always understood. The Datsun's value was discovered late, which meant there was more room to run.

Restoring a Datsun today means accepting a scavenger hunt that has no guaranteed ending. Because the brand was discontinued in the U.S. market in 1986 and so many cars were scrapped during the lean years, the supply of original parts has been shrinking for decades. What's left is scattered across private collections, overseas suppliers, and the occasional estate sale box that nobody has opened since 1994. A restoration shop owner in Tennessee who specializes in early Japanese cars described spending fourteen months tracking down a correct-specification fuel rail for a 1970 240Z. Not a reproduction — those exist for some components — but an original part that matched the car's build date and configuration. He eventually found one in New Zealand, which required navigating international shipping and customs paperwork that added months to an already long search. Body panels are the hardest category. Rocker panels, rear quarters, and floor sections for the 510 and early Z-cars were never remanufactured in large quantities, and the original stampings that survived are mostly in the hands of restorers who aren't selling. Reproduction panels exist for some applications, but experienced restorers will tell you the fit rarely matches factory spec. For a collector who wants a correct, uncompromised restoration, the parts situation alone can make or break a project before the first bolt is turned.

The Datsun collector community represents something specific in American car culture: people who want to hold onto the cars that shaped their early driving lives before the last solid examples disappear. For many of them, a 510 or a 240Z wasn't just a car — it was the first vehicle they owned outright, the one they drove across the country, the one they learned to tune on a Saturday morning with a Haynes manual and a set of basic hand tools. Most of the obvious opportunities are gone. The days of finding a clean 240Z for under $10,000 are over, and the 510 two-door market has been picked through thoroughly by collectors who knew what they were looking for. But a handful of models still sit quietly undervalued. The Datsun B210 — sold in enormous numbers through the mid-1970s — is still largely ignored by the collector market despite its clean styling and surprising durability. The 610 series, which bridged the gap between the beloved 510 and the later 810, has barely registered on auction sites. Those cars won't stay cheap forever. The same pattern that played out with the 240Z and 510 — dismissal, then slow recognition, then a sharp price correction — tends to repeat itself as collector tastes evolve. The window on the next generation of overlooked Datsuns is open, but it won't stay that way.