Allegedly, production of the new Nissan Z kicked off in the spring of 2022 and has continued ever since. Allegedly. You’d think if the new Z was an actual car that actually existed, you would see them more frequently than you do, which I’m betting is basically never. Is it a prank? A charade? Well, whatever it is, Nissan isn’t dropping its act — at least not yet. According to the Japanese automaker’s latest report, more than 5,000 U.S. Americans bought a new Nissan Z in 2025.
Yes, if you believe Nissan’s numbers, it sold 5,487 Zs here last year. Compared to the 479,288 RAV4s that Toyota sold in 2025, that’s basically a rounding error, but still. That’s enough Zs to put 100 in each state with a few left over for Washington, D.C. It’s also a lot more than the 3,164 Zs that Nissan claims it sold in 2024, which works out to a 73.4% increase. That’s really not bad at all. If a genie offered you the ability to do 73.4% better at something next year, I bet you’d take that deal, too.
It also looks pretty good when you consider that Toyota only sold 2,953 Supras in 2025. Assuming I can still do math correctly, Nissan’s Z sales were 85.8% higher than the Supra’s, which is wild, even before you get into the part where you’re lucky if you’ve seen a single new Z on the road that wasn’t a press car.
It’s not all good news
That said, it wasn’t all good news for the alleged new Z. While year-over-year sales were up significantly, they actually tanked in Q4. Nissan only managed to sell 665 Zs in Q4, down 32.8% from Q4 2024, when Nissan sold 989 of them. So that’s probably not a good sign. Except it gets worse, because Nissan’s Z sales had an incredibly strong start last year and then dropped every quarter after that, even if quarter-over-quarter sales still looked good for the most part.
At the end of Q1, Nissan reported it sold 2,154 Zs, a massive 221.0% jump over the 671 Zs it sold in Q1 2024. Then, in Q2, Nissan sold 1,635 Zs here, which was still a lot more than the 786 it sold the previous year but also significantly less than it managed to move in Q1, as well as a reversal of the previous year’s trend that showed Z sales improving from Q1 to Q2. Nissan then sold 1,033 Zs in Q3, up 43.9% from the 718 it sold in the previous Q3, even though total sales were once again lower than they were in the previous quarter. Q4’s 665 sales only continued the trend.
But why, though?
Unfortunately for us, we can’t know exactly what caused sales to drop every quarter, but it sure does look like politics played a big part in what happened. Q4 2024 sales ticked up and then exploded in Q1 2025, suggesting a bunch of people with money decided to reward themselves with new sports cars, while some people probably wanted to buy before Trump slapped tariff taxes on pretty much everything, regardless of how they voted. That first tariff announcement came at the beginning of Q2, which generally lines up with the start of the sales slide for the new Nissan Z. Suddenly, buying a new sports car probably became a much lower priority, especially one that’s built in Japan.
The real question for this year is whether Z sales will settle back at about 2024 levels or if 2025’s quarterly sales drops will continue. If they do, it’s hard to see how Nissan continues to offer the new Z in the U.S. Especially since Nissan’s latest CEO is an alleged car guy who said he wants to build a new Silvia and is likely responsible for the Nismo Z finally getting a manual transmission. Those are all good things, and it would be a shame to see sales slide to the point Nissan can no longer justify selling it here at all.
