Nils Ehrat

Somehow I have always been interested in technology, and aesthetics.
So when I got closer to the age of driving a car, I started to get interested in cars that looked good. And because I was as much a teenager as anybody else, I was particularly interested in cool looking cars. However, while most people at that time were interested in the most crazy colours and put as many spoilers on their car as possible, I was more interested in having the package look nice and fit together. Obviously money was an issue, so my first car was a Honda Civic 1.4l “Granny spec” EJ9, which I modified on all edges and learnt a thing or two about changing parts on your car. During that time I also learnt about “JDM” culture and was very active on some online forums.

As it was very difficult to get parts from Japan back then, I started to import them myself and it slowly became a booming business. At one point I decided it would also make sense to use my contacts to import complete cars, and that’s when I got my Civic Type-Rx EK9 from Japan. The car and parts brought me a bit of attention in the community, and so I also became one of the administrators of the Swiss Hondaholics forum, which again made me connect to a lot of people in the Honda scene which were into tuning, racing or generally automotive things.

At some point I thought it was time to do something different. I decided to abandon my business, and focus on my professional engineering career and start a different project. During my army service time, I spent my breaks browsing local car websites for classic Japanese cars. I was inspired by “Smoky” Nagata’s Top secret Celica project.

But once I stumbled on the 240Z, it was love on first sight, and I bought the first one without really knowing what to look at. The plan was to give it a quick overhaul and use it as a fun weekend car.

Unfortunately, after taking the car apart completely, I realized the car was in terrible shape and I had to buy another one to continue the project. Luckily I found a very cheap one which the seller had to get rid of because his company went bankrupt. I paid a bargain of 300.- USD for it:

The condition was bad too, but still restorable. Who wants an easy project anyway? 12 years later, the car is still in parts. But good things take their time. It took me many years to find missing original body panels and all the small parts. I’m doing a full nut-and-bolt restoration without really having restored a car before, so it’s a constant learning process.

While at it, decided to “improve” a few details, but my goal is to keep a “final Euro spec” car in very good condition. And whenever I find some minutes to work on it, I do. Meanwhile, I even built a house with a dedicated garage, workshop and storage area around the project, and I’m very fortunate to have found many rare parts, documents, and good people and have my own project corner downstairs and my growing 240Z archives/library upstairs.

While I had previously documented my projects in various forums and my blog. With this project I started to really post every step on my blog, this again connected me to a lot of nice people.
I started to write stories about some details of the cars and the general Datsun/Nissan/240Z/Fairlady Z history too.

What drives me is the curiosity and to uncover some unknown treasures and stories, or simply to find out something I wasn’t able to find elsewhere. I like to research and find the things that nobody else does. This made me try to find many original documents and knowledgeable people around the world to help me write those stories and share them on my website.

This again led to a lot of online and offline contacts around the world, and meanwhile to many great friendships. And ultimately, I was asked by Chris to share my stories in the S30.world database, which I’m more than happy to do, and share them with an even broader community.