At least here in Southern California, which seems to be unique in having prices on vehicles higher than everywhere else. JDM’s popularity has ensured that both owners and dealers aren’t budging from their prices. To top it all off, its getting harder to find ones that either don’t have shitty mods, have been in accidents (out of 19 total local listings, 4 had accidents and 1 had a salvage history, I didn’t include them here because their prices are cheaper for obvious reasons), or both.
Lets start off with this insane example (there’s always one right?). For sale at an actual Honda dealer in Indio, they have a 2000 S2000 with just under 10k miles which is pretty low for a car that is over 20 years old now. Asking price? $69,895. Whats even more hilarious is that they have taken $5 bucks off the price. But its CP as evidenced by it having a listing that’s been up for 1627 days, which for those of you not good with math, amounts to this thing being for sale for a record 4 and a half years.
Other than that, there are only 17 S2000’s for sales in Southern California with an average price of just under 22 grand with mileage average just over 93k. You pretty much can’t find an S2000 under 12 grand here.
The rest of the country looks like there’s hope, which I think has more to do with people not being interested in a small convertible in less than stellar climates. Examples can be found for more palatable prices of $9-12k, but of course prices raise fast with the highest prices being on the rare CR models (of which I only found 4: 2 in the $50s and 2 in the high $30s).
So its looking like if you want a cheap Japanese convertible sports car the answer still is going to be Miata.