- Nissan might bring back the Silvia globally
- The Silvia could potentially serve as an entry-level sports car
- Nissan has shown some electric sports car concepts in recent years
With the GT-R soon to be out of production and a successor nowhere in sight, Nissan's sports car lineup will soon be down to just the Z.
However, the Z is on the wrong side of regulations in Europe and several countries outside the region, and with the GT-R on its way out Nissan will soon be left with very little to attract performance fans in those markets.
A solution may be a modern Silvia, Nissan's traditional entry-level sports car which was last sold in the U.S. in the 1990s as the 240SX. Nissan discontinued the global Silvia in 2002.
Speaking with Top Gear in an interview published on Monday, Nissan's head of global product strategy, Ivan Espinosa, said a modern Silvia was possible, assuming there is a business case.
Nissan Silvia EV concept
Espinosa said the car would have to be sold globally to make it work, and that are a lot of Silvia fans around, even though the nameplate has been out of production for more than two decades.
In a previous interview with Top Gear published last year, Espinosa said Nissan was considering an entry-level performance model that he wants to be a proper sports car and not just a hot hatch.
Rumors of the Silvia's return date back to almost when the last Silvia bowed out of production. A Nissan designer from Europe in 2021 presented some design sketches for a vision of a modern Silvia powered by batteries.
It isn't clear whether a modern Silvia would be powered by batteries, or stick with a gas engine, though Nissan has rolled out some electric sports car concepts in the recent past. One of these was the Max-Out roadster. Nissan design chief Alfonso Albaisa in a 2022 interview with Motor Authority hinted at the possibility of an electric convertible sports car, though he referred to it as a Fairlady, a name used by Nissan's Z sports car on occasion.
