Closing out this week’s batch from Taizo is a pale sage/olive-green metallic Nissan Silvia CSP311 — a two-door hardtop coupe with chrome steel wheels, whitewall tires, vented chrome dome hub caps, and roughly 74,000 km on the clock. It is one of the rarest cars we’ve featured: Nissan built barely 550 of them.
History
Produced from 1965 to 1968, the CSP311 is usually credited with total production of 554 units — a figure that lines up across nearly every source we checked (one site, csp311.net, cites 1,111, but that number is an outlier and we’re not using it). It shares its platform and mechanicals with the Fairlady 1600 (SP311), but the body is a hand-built, image-leading halo car rather than a volume model.
The styling is Nissan’s own work: in-house designer Kazuo Kimura had the basic shape essentially finished by March 1963. Count Albrecht Goertz — the designer behind the BMW 507 — joined as a consultant from May 1963 and refined details including the C-pillar, but the core design was already Kimura’s before Goertz arrived. We’ve seen “early model” used in used-car listings for this car, but we could not find a primary source describing a documented front-of-production vs. end-of-production design change within the CSP311’s build run; it appears to be a sales term rather than a specific, verifiable production split, so we’re using it here only as a description, not a technical claim about specific features.
Engine
Power is from Nissan’s R-series 1,595cc OHV inline-four, fed by twin SU-type (Hitachi-built) carburetors, producing 90 PS (JIS) / 96 hp (SAE) at 6,000 rpm and 13.5 kgm of torque at 4,000 rpm.
Wheels and Fitment: What We Could Not Verify
This car wears chrome steel wheels with whitewall tires and vented chrome dome hub caps — a clean, period-correct look, though we can’t confirm from documentation whether the hub caps are original Nissan parts. The wood-rimmed steering wheel may be a later aftermarket addition rather than factory equipment; we’re noting it as a feature of this individual car rather than asserting it as original. On fitment, we could confirm tire size (5.60-14), a 4-inch rim width, and 21 psi recommended pressure from a period source, and that 14-inch steel wheels were standard per Classic Motorsports. We could not find a confirmed bolt circle diameter, bolt count, or hub bore for the CSP311 in any source we could access, including wheel-size.com and automobile-catalog — so we are not publishing a PCD figure for this chassis.
Trivia
- Launch price was ¥1.2 million — roughly 2.8 times the average annual income at the time, and about double a contemporary Fairlady or Sunny.
- In December 1965, the Kanagawa Prefectural Police put two CSP311s into service as Japan’s first high-performance patrol cars, chosen for their speed and disc brakes.
- With well under 600 built and very few known survivors, the CSP311 is considered the origin point of Nissan’s sports coupe lineage and now commands serious money when one changes hands.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Nissan Silvia
- Curbside Classic: 1965 Nissan Silvia CSP311
- Classic Motorsports: Rare, Original Nissan Silvia
- csp311.net: CSP311 Development History
- motor-car.net: Nissan Silvia CSP311
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