The 240Z was one of the sexiest affordable coupes ever. I understand the passion for the owner mentioned to perform the extended renovation, but I would sure hate to be in an accident in that car. Modern cars are an order of magnitude stronger and safer, due in large part to federal regulations enacted since the 1970s.
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My first car was the Chevy Vega. Pretty much the same thing as the 240. Really only the name was different. Nothing else different at all.
I guess the rear axle fell off at one point, but that happens to all cars, right?
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I had one back in the day. I believe the 1600cc engine was basically the one from the 240Z with two cylinders sawn off. If you just looked at the specs on paper, it read like a poor person’s BMW 1600.
In terms of fun per dollar, it was one of the great deals of the early '70s.
They are probably still there, just in the form of scattered flakes of rust. 
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Shoulda paid extra for the undercoating…
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These used to be my favorites. I owned two over the years, one stock and one hotrodded within an inch of its life (requiring water injection not to grenade). Classic lines and easy enough to work on. But they are cruder than my memories of them. As a teen it didn’t matter. Now I prefer the Honda S2000 for a car in the same wheelhouse.
Oh, and I owned a 280ZX for many years. The gold and black, with T-tops, totally 80’s with rear louvers! It was more grand touring than sports but was quite good at that, a character I also enjoyed in the later Acura Integra GSR.
2000 is handsome indeed, but second you on the 510! Such a small production window. Your photo evokes E30’s+ rally cars in me… Never seen one in vivo, so it’s on my carspotting “bingo”/“birder’s” card still.
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Although, if I had the money, I’d go straight to Japan to have a word with this fine gentleman:
(No slushbox on mine tho, thx)
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My coworker had a 240Z with a Chevy 327 that he installed, back in the eighties when it was more commonplace. He said that it didn’t take long for him to break the rear end. It’s not really in keeping with the spirit of the car to give it lots of power, as the joy of a sports car is found by driving a windy mountain road in the lowest gear possible.
He worked on a telescope so he got lots of opportunities to drive on windy mountain roads.
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I recall a very old article in Road & Track or Car & Driver (a roommate bought them all the time) that superimposed the 240Z side view drawing over the Ferrari Daytona silhouette and claimed it was designed to evoke that impression.
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I knew a guy at school who had a Daytona, so I was sort of familiar with the appearance (only from the outside 
I walked beside him as he followed me through the parking lot one day. He had a telephone in it! ). Smaller than I had expected from magazine pictures, it really did evoke that impression
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They were sold in Australia as the Datsun 1600 and were a fantastic rally car. I had one for a few years in the late 1980’s - great power/weight ratio and the fact that I am alive more than thirty years later says something about how sure-footed they were.
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I had a friend who did the SBC swap and ended up with a car that was a little too twitchy for him so he left it parked most of the time. But he got his back up if anyone suggested he was afraid to drive it.
Jim Halsey, the CIO at Warner Bros, has a 240Z with a Viper V10 wedged into it. He had to have the firewall moved back to accommodate it.
Here are a couple of photos from back in 2012 when I was there on business.
And a link to a post of a post describing the build:
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I honestly think it won’t go anywhere (pardon the pun). The motor/inverter/charger package is the easy part of electric cars. You can already buy off the shelf open source solutions. The batteries are the hard part, and electric cars are built entirely around trying to find ways and places to put them. The entire floor of a Tesla or Bolt is battery, and even there that’s barely enough for an acceptable range. Retrofitting to ICE cars, there’s no way to do this. People vastly underestimate how much battery you need to make electric cars practical. The battery is also 80% of the the cost of an electric car, again for good reason. It’s where all the technology and hard stuff is. For example, the battery is climate-controlled, which a lot of people don’t realize. That system alone is very complex. The motor is just an off the shelf industrial AC motor with a big-ass inverter so you can run it off DC from a battery.
Aero is another big one. Electrics and hybrids are obsessed with drag coefficient in a way that ICE cars don’t have to be. It’s why a lot of them are ugly, frankly. Nice looking cars are usually giving up efficiency to look nicer, and electric cars can’t afford to do that. Again, they are barely practical and have no margin to give up efficiency, or range goes to hell. Electric conversions are always disappointing and limited to being local grocery getters for suburbs for this reason.
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While I can see the connection, I think the 240z actually looks better. While I think it is the other way around in that case, the copying of Ferrari designs leads to a lot of Ferrari F550 / 575s misidentified as “ricers” (at least until you hear the engine noise).
(Edit adds: picture from Ferrari 550 (1996 - 2002) kaufen | Classic Driver )
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Yeah, the Daytona front end seemed a little arbitrary… the 550 though, another one of those cars where pictures don’t prepare you for the actual visual impact. So many people photograph cars from angles you don’t actually experience IRL
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