9 Of The Most Popular Japanese Performance Cars To Import (And Why Enthusiasts Love Them)

A certain breed of American car enthusiast is very good at taking any year in the late 20th century and adding 25. It's like "Rain Man," but for extremely simple arithmetic. They're determining whether a vehicle sold abroad has reached 25 years old, thus exempting it from Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards in the U.S., and making it fair game for American import. It's the mechanism by which countless Skylines, Evo variants, and performance Hondas — not to mention the occasional kei car — have found their way stateside, and you really just need to know how to import a Japanese car to America without making your head explode if you want to pull it off yourself.

📌 The Core Development

Right now, that 25-year math is opening the door on a whole new batch of turn-of-the-millennium vehicles: What's up, Japanese Domestic Market Honda Integra Type R from 2001? But that 25-year window has been rolling for a while now, and some clear favorites have emerged. Japanese import marketplace JDMBuySell maintains a ranking of the most-watched JDM vehicles, combining buyer inquiries on its site with American Google search activity to gauge demand. Those aren't import totals, but they offer a pretty good indication of what enthusiasts are shopping for. Here are nine of the most popular choices, and why people want them.

The Nissan Skyline GT-R is arguably Nissan's most famous performance car and the Skyline family commands an extraordinary share of enthusiast import attention. On the JDMBuySell top 10 ranking of what JDM buyers are watching, the Skyline holds not just the top spot, but three of the top four. The R34 leads the pack as number one, the R32 is number three, and the R33 takes fourth.

🔍 Background & Sector Context

There's plenty of substance behind the Skyline's mythological status. When Nissan revived the GT-R with the R32 in 1989, it did so with a 2.6-liter twin-turbocharged inline-6 with electronically controlled four-wheel drive and four-wheel multilink suspension. The R33 and R34 followed, iterating on the formula, and eventually giving enthusiasts three generations of increasingly sophisticated performance machinery to choose from.

Yet one of the biggest reasons the GT-R holds a special place in so many enthusiasts' hearts is that Americans got a taste of the legend long before they could legally import one. It was a GT-R on the cover of the original Gran Turismo video game for PlayStation in 1997. Considering that the Gran Turismo franchise has sold more than 90 million copies globally, a whole lot of kids grew up experiencing the car digitally decades before they could even consider getting their hands on the real thing.

📊 Industry & Real-World Impact

Back to that "add 25" math: As of 2024, each of these three generations had at the least begun qualifying for import, with later examples becoming eligible every year. Being allowed to buy one is one thing, though, and paying for one is quite another.

🔮 Strategic Outlook & What Lies Ahead

The history of Mazda's most famous rotary powered car is full of nuance and enthusiast nerdery. This specific case, the JDM-spec RX-7 FD, is a perfect example of that, holding sixth place in those JDMBuySell popularity rankings. But it's also the one car on this list where the unfamiliar might rightfully ask, "Wait a minute, couldn't you buy these in the United States?" The answer is ... sort of.

That's because American RX-7 sales ended after the 1995 model year, while the Japanese market continued having access to new examples all the way through 2002. That opens up the possibility not just of a half-decade-newer car, but one that reflects years of additional refinement and development. In fact, a major update in 1999 included a turbocharger upgrade, better cooling, and updates to the suspension, plus revisions to the aero that included a rad rear wing.