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Nissan Australia confident 400Z will build on Zed-car legacy

The incoming new Zed car will be worthy of the badge, says Nissan.


Nissan Australia says it will request as many examples of the 400Z sports car as it can get its hands on, because it believes the new model will be more popular than ever.

While the arrival timing and pricing for the Nissan 400Z are yet to be announced, there is widespread speculation it will be in showrooms next year with turbocharged V6 power, which is likely to make it an instant smash hit among performance enthusiasts and the drifting community alike.

“It’s fair to say that I think no car enthusiast would turn down the next-generation Z and therefore we are no different,” Stephen Lester, managing director for Nissan Australia, told CarAdvice. “We'll have our hands raised early and often to get our hands on the next Z.”

Note: The image above is a speculative rendering based on the official teaser image shown below and originally released in May.

The Nissan boss said Australia's love affair for performance cars means the company is expecting a lot of interest in the 400Z.

“Australia’s love affair with performance has a long and rich history,” said Lester. “At Nissan, we’re obviously glad and excited that cars like Godzilla (Nissan GT-R) and the Z have left such a mark on the automotive landscape here.”

Lester added that “it’s not just Nissan, and it’s not solely sports car models either, that work well here”.

“Whether they are actually sports cars or sports option packages on other models, they do very, very well in this market,” said Lester.

The Nissan Zed car is a strong part of the Japanese brand's heritage in Australia, starting with the Datsun 240Z in the 1970s.

Affordable, reliable, and delivering the kind of front-engine, rear-wheel-drive performance you’d usually expect from a European sports car, the original Datsun 240Z set the tone for the Zed-car nameplate in Australia.

Through every generation of Zed car since, even for the less popular models (such as the 300ZX), there has always been a strong and vocal fanbase in Australia.


Below: the 370Z

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Trent Nikolic

Trent Nikolic has been road testing and writing about cars for almost 20 years. He’s been at CarAdvice/Drive since 2014 and has been a motoring editor at the NRMA, Overlander 4WD Magazine, Hot4s and Auto Salon Magazine.

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