From our other sites
The story
A thread titled “Isn’t Initial D kind of lame with how low-class it feels?” went up in 5ch’s Nanimo Jikkyo G (anything-goes live-commentary board), and replies piled up around the prices of the cars the series’ street racers drive and how much their mods would’ve cost. The first half of the thread started from the question “where’s the money for modding a car even coming from?” before turning into a back-and-forth of specific numbers about what the used car market actually looked like around 2000, when the series began serialization. Posters swapped personal stories about buying the pricey cars from the show — the 34 GT-R, the FD, the Silvia — for just a few hundred thousand yen, clashing with others insisting they must have cost millions. In the end, the thread caught fire less over whether the characters were “low-class” and more over correcting each other’s fuzzy memories of the market.
What people said
How much does it even cost
to mod a car?
Calling it a 'manga book' just reminded me of my grandpa, thanks for that
That's exactly how you end up stuck with an '86 (AE86, the protagonist's beat-up Corolla)…
Gas stations were raking in absurd profits back then, as always
The 'rich kid's hobby' angle for them actually feels pretty realistic
You could buy one on a loan
it's just a domestic car
Prices have shot up now, but back then they were dirt-cheap trash prices, that's exactly why they made good base cars to mod
When the series first started, most of those models could be had for next to nothing…
No it wouldn't, like 20,000 yen tops
Now all Japan's got left is the GR86 and the Z
What about the Civic, the Swift, the BRZ?
What, those FF (front-wheel-drive) junkers?
What, those FF (front-wheel-drive) junkers?
Small cars are cheap anyway, right?
The poor man's Porsche?
No decent working adult would ever get this fired up over something so dumb, so of course they had to cast low-life losers for it
Nah, that's wrong
Otaku can't afford cars
Not exactly dirt-cheap trash prices though
used ones ran about 3 million yen
A nice-condition GT-R or the latest Lancer Evo would run you 3 million yen even back then, but I don't think any of the racers in the story besides the Takahashi brothers and Nakazato actually bought cars like that
Everyone else picked up their base cars for a few hundred thousand yen, or just over a million at most
The S2000 shows up, so probably around 2000
back then you could get one for 100,000 yen or even free
so even part-timers and NEETs could afford to play around with them
in a way, that's actually realistic
How is that misinformation allowed to stand
They're high-demand enthusiast cars
so resale value runs high too
How is that misinformation allowed to stand?!
They're high-demand enthusiast cars
so resale value runs high too
they're popular models after all
A beat-up S13 was exactly like that
It was such a huge hit when new that there were plenty of them around
and 7-8 years later the used price dropped to next to nothing
by then everyone wanted an S14 or S15 instead
Gas could get as cheap as the 70-yen-a-liter range back then
A new EG6 cost around 1.8 million yen…
Even the EK9 (Civic Type R) listed for 1.99 million
Nah, broke kids got them passed around within the scene
Besides, back then a sports car with 100,000km on the clock
had already been modded who-knows-how
it was basically free scrap material anyway
Getting one handed down by a senior for next to nothing
was a classic story too, bikes included
like 'I don't need this Zephyr anymore, want it for 50,000 yen?'
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Initial D ran as a manga from 1995 to 2013, and in-story details — like the appearance of the Honda S2000 — suggest the story is set around the year 2000. The reason price perceptions clashed so hard in the thread comes down to how wildly the used market for Japanese sports cars has swung over time. From the late ’90s through the early 2000s, sports cars that had just gone out of production flooded the market and crashed in value, so it wasn’t unusual to find these models going for a few hundred thousand yen. In recent years, though, a boom in classic-car popularity has sent the same models soaring into the millions. That gap meant posters arguing from “today’s market sense” and posters arguing from “the market sense of back then” kept talking past each other. In the end, the thread’s real point of contention wasn’t whether the characters counted as “low-class,” but how to read this gap between generations.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nanimo Jikkyo G) thread “Isn’t Initial D Kind of Lame With How Low-Class It Feels?.”
Leave a Reply