We All Should Have Bought Honda S2000s When They Were Cheap

Photo: Facebook Marketplace

The Honda S2000 is one of the better cars ever put together by human hands. It’s lightweight, nimble, and rewarding to wring out to its limits. Yet, these are all qualities that I’ve heard rather than experienced, because S2000s are too damn expensive now. For example, this S2000 for sale on Marketplace, is listed for an asking price $32,000.

Is The Honda S2000 A Modern Classic?

It’s not an absurd price, given the market for these cars, and the seller may well get every penny they’re asking. Looking at where S2000 prices came from, though, ads like these just make me feel bad. When I was in college, these cars used to regularly go for the low teens. A clean example like this, relatively but not obsessively low mileage, would maybe cost $17,000 — nothing to sneeze at, sure, but that’s barely over half what it’s asking now. I remember seeing S2000s for $8,000! They weren’t nice, sure, but they ran and drove as Soichiro intended them to. What more do you need?

Now those days are gone. The cheapest S2000 on AutoTrader has 91,000 miles and mismatched fenders, and it’s still asking over $20,000. The era of the cheap S2K is dead, and we all watched it pass us by.

We should’ve been buying these things in droves, back six to eight years ago. Not the CRs or the museum pieces, but clean and drivable examples like this one. We all deserve to experience the joy of the S2000, but most of us missed our chance. It’s a damn shame.