Heavily-damaged Nissan Skyline GT-R sells for almost $140,000 at auction

A heavily-damaged Nissan Skyline GT-R – regarded as one of Japan’s greatest sports cars – has sold at an Australian auction for almost $140,000, as prices of the all-wheel-drive coupes continue to skyrocket across the globe.

In a post on social media platform Facebook, Nissan enthusiast group GT-R Registry claims the R34-generation Skyline GT-R was sold at a Manheim auction in Brisbane for a hammer price of $122,000 – or approximately $138,500 after applying Manheim’s 13.45 per cent auction fees. 

When the R34-generation Nissan Skyline GT-R was launched in 1999, it cost nearly 5 million Japanese Yen in its home country – equivalent to about $AU56,085 now.

The Nissan Skyline R34 GT-R was never officially imported into Australia, though it became one of the most sought-after ‘grey imports’, with private owners shipping over examples from Japan.

According to the auction listing, this particular example was first registered in Australia in December 2005 – almost three years after production of the R34 Skyline GT-R ended – but it has since sustained front underbody damage after a crash.

One commenter on GT-R Registry’s Facebook post claimed they had inspected the car in person and found its engine block had cracked from the impact – with its new owner having to factor in additional costs if they want to replace the twin-turbo 2.6-litre, straight six-cylinder engine.

GT-R Registry claims 1268 of the 11,578 R34 Skyline GT-Rs built by Nissan were the ‘Series 2’ – including this example – which represented a significant decrease on the R32 (43,937) and R33 (16,668) generation models.

While prices of all Nissan Skyline GT-Rs have skyrocketed in recent years, an expected upcoming increase in demand from the US has been attributed to price hikes of R34-generation examples.

In the US, cars which are younger than 25 years old are not allowed to be privately imported – but as the R34 Skyline GT-R is now less than a year away from reaching the quarter-century mark, a boom in prices in Australia and overseas as owners prepare for the an expected influx of orders from motorists stateside.

In the past year, there have been two new global price records set for the R34 Skyline GT-R.

The confirmed sale record for a Nissan Skyline GT-R (of any generation) was reset from $US315,187 ($AU415,000) in November 2022, when an extremely rare R34 ‘Clubman Race Spec’ example sold for 5.1 million Hong Kong dollars ($AU972,000).

This price was eclipsed in May 2023 when a ‘Bayside Blue’ Nissan R34 Skyline GT-R – which was made famous after appearing in the Fast and Furious movie franchise – sold for an eye-watering $US1.357 million ($AU2 million) including auction fees.

The record-holding Nissan Skyline GT-R had been in the spotlight before, appearing as one of the star cars in the 2009 film Fast and Furious, driven on screen by the late Paul Walker who reprised his lead role as FBI Agent ‘Brian O’Conner’.

While it was imported to the US without an engine – allowing its importers to bypass the country’s stringent import laws and sell the sports coupe to stateside customers as a ‘kit car’ – it was later impounded by the US Border Force, before subsequently being released in 2012 and shipped to Germany via the Netherlands.