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If you've always thought that the 25-year-rule doesn't make a lot of sense from an emissions standpoint, well, you may be on to something. Mercedes-Benz lobbied for the ruling back in 1989, hoping to protect its dealers from gray-market imports — that is, cars that are legal to import but which have no official sales outlet in a given country. We've been missing out on cool stuff ever since.
To show you what we're talking about, let's highlight a few JDM cars that are now over 25 years of age, and legal to import.
The Mazda Cosmo nameplate dates back to the late 1960s, hearkening to its Space Race-era roots, but the one that we're interested in is the 20B-powered luxury model from the 1990s.
Eunos refers to Mazda's luxury sub-brand, in operation from 1989 to 1996 in Japan. A Eunos would be like a Lexus or an Acura, but for Mazda. 20B refers to the 1,962 cc twin-turbo three-rotor Wankel engine, the 20B-RE.
For its time, the car was state of the art, with a CRT touchscreen, a car phone, and an LCD-based instrument cluster. The 2.0-liter model boasts 276 horsepower and can accelerate to 60 mph in under six seconds, and it can reach top speeds of around 160 mph without the 112-mph electronic limiter (necessitated by the JDM industry's Gentleman's Agreement).
The Eunos Cosmo sold 8,875 units from 1990 to 1995, with roughly 40%, or around 3,550 of those, packing the 20B engine. Surviving models that have made it to American import sellers are relatively scarce.
In our own search, we only turned up two recent listings.
There's no telling if these listings will still be up by the time you read this, but they should give you an idea of what's out there, and what you can expect to pay. Pricing is fair for what you're getting, but anyone who has one of these cars for sale knows exactly how rare it is.
If the Cosmo's rarity feels daunting, the next car on this list solves that problem – but comes with a different kind of scarcity.
The first-gen Nissan Stagea was in production from 1996 to 2001. These are all legal to import by now, but it's the 260RS model, launched in 1997, that we're most excited about. This one was tuned by Autech, the tuning division of Nissan Motorsports & Customizing, and features a whole suite of upgrades.
The Stagea 260RS runs on a tuned RB26DETT, the legendary performance engine found in the Nissan Skyline GT-R. Key mechanical upgrades include a limited-slip rear differential, Brembo brakes, 17-inch BBS forged alloy wheels, and underbody protection. Additionally, the car features an Autech body kit with unique spoilers and side skirts, Autech badging, an R33 GT-R steering wheel, and a leather shift knob and parking brake handle.
Expect to hit 60 mph in around 5.5 seconds in this wagon, courtesy of the 276 hp-producing 2.6-Liter Twin-Turbo 6-Cylinder.
The Autech version of this wagon is pretty scarce, but not impossible to find on the import market. We turned up a few listings.
This model is fairly obscure in the US, so interest is limited, but so is supply.Both the Cosmo and the Stagea are rare enough that patience is mandatory. But the third car on this list flips that equation entirely – Toyota made over 24,000 of them.
The Toyota Chaser first went into production in 1977, the height of the Malaise Era. The most compelling version of this car, the JZX100 Tourer V, was a late-1990s sedan produced from 1996 to 2001, running on a 1JZ-GTE straight-six. For the Chaser's sixth generation, Tourers were the sporty trims, while the Avantes were the luxury models.
The 276-hp Tourer V can hit 60 mph in as little as 5.2 seconds, and it features double-wishbone suspension up front with a multi-link setup in the rear. In the cabin, the car blends sportiness with daily-driver comfort, featuring carbon fiber trim paired with digital climate control and a then-state-of-the-art CD stereo system.
Toyota built 24,349 Tourer Vs for the JZX100 generation, making for a four-door that's not all that hard to find on the import market. We turned up the following listings.
The Chaser is a relatively easy car to find, compared to the other JDMs we've covered here. Finding one is the easy part – knowing how to buy it safely is the next challenge.
If you've never bought an imported JDM car before, just know that the process isn't so much expensive as it is tedious. Waiting for the car that you want to pop up on the market, at the right price, from a reputable seller, can take months.
Our key advice would be to research the seller before buying anything. JDMBuySell is not actually a dealer, but an advertising site for import sellers, meaning you'll need to vet the individual dealers who list there. The same goes for CarFromJapan. That is, you can trust the websites, but not necessarily every single seller who operates on them.
You might not want to bother importing a JDM if you're not ready to get your hands dirty. Your nearby Mazda dealer might not even be willing to work on your Cosmo, due to parts availability issues and unfamiliarity with right-hand drive models. You're going to be doing a lot of maintenance yourself, and potentially waiting months for replacement parts to ship.
If working on a unique project car sounds right up your alley, go for it. Just don't expect a Chaser Tourer V to be as easy to maintain as a 2001Toyota Corolla.
Sources: Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, JDMBuySell, CarFromJapan.
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