Remember when sports cars had roof panels you could pop out and toss in the trunk? Nissan does, and its new Z Kaze concept drags that old feeling straight into the present with a proper T-top roof, teal paint, and a heavy nod to ’90s tuner culture.
- The Z Kaze concept features a genuine T-top roof, not a convertible or a targa, a setup missing from sports cars for over two decades.
- It wears Pacific Teal paint, a carbon fiber body kit, fender flares, and restored 18-inch NISMO LMGT2 wheels.
- Nissan revealed the car at ZCON in Phoenix and won’t confirm whether it reaches production.
What a T-Top Actually Is
The T-top gets its name from the shape it leaves behind. Two removable panels sit on either side of a fixed center bar that runs front to back, so from above the roof structure looks like the letter T. Pull the panels and you get most of the open-air feeling of a convertible while keeping some of the coupe’s rigidity and roll-over protection.
The idea took off on the 1968 C3 Corvette and stayed popular through the 1970s and 1980s. Burt Reynolds sliding around in a black Trans Am for the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit probably didn’t hurt the look either. Then the style quietly disappeared. The Z Kaze brings it back, and the name fits the mood. Kaze is the Japanese word for wind, which is the whole point of yanking the panels out on a sunny day.
Built Like a ’90s Time Capsule
Nissan calls the Z Kaze a passion project, put together by its own product planners and designers who wanted to show off the open-top side of the Z’s history. The team said it was chasing the feeling of a summer drive along California’s Pacific Coast Highway, and the details back that up.
Start with the Pacific Teal paint, meant to echo the color palette of ’90s sports car culture. Then look closer. There’s a lightweight vented carbon fiber hood, fender flares, and a custom carbon fiber aerodynamic body kit. The wheels are the real conversation piece. They’re authentic 18-inch NISMO LMGT2 forged multi-piece units, long out of production, that Nissan tracked down as an original set and had restored and rebuilt. They measure 10 inches wide up front and 11 inches out back, which gives the car a planted, aggressive stance.
Underneath, the suspension is reworked with NISMO performance parts. The engine picks up a GReddy SUPREME SP exhaust, a front-mount air-to-air intercooler kit, and an Airinx air filter kit. This is the kind of build sheet that would have made a tuner magazine cover thirty years ago, which seems to be exactly the reaction Nissan is going for.
Nissan’s Open-Top History
The Z has gone topless before. There were convertible versions of the 300ZX from 1993 to 1996, the 350Z from 2004 to 2009, and the 370Z from 2010 to 2019. The 370Z Roadster was the last open Z you could buy new, and it got the axe after the 2019 model year. So a Z you can open up is not some wild fantasy. It’s a feature the brand walked away from fairly recently.
Will It Ever Reach a Showroom?
Nissan isn’t committing to anything. The Z Kaze is a concept, and the company has stayed coy about production plans. Executives have hinted they’d love to build it if enough enthusiasts make enough noise, but that should be read as an open door, not a promise. Treat any talk of a production T-top Z as speculation for now.
The sales math is a mixed bag. The current Z, a roughly 400-horsepower coupe, outsold the Toyota Supra by nearly two to one recently, though that still added up to just 5,487 cars in 2025. That’s a thin margin to justify spinning off a niche T-top variant, and it’s probably why Nissan is testing the water with a show car first.
If you want to see the Z Kaze in person, it appeared at ZCON in Phoenix, Arizona, then headed to the Japanese Classic Car Show on October 3 at Marina Green Park in Long Beach, California. For anyone who grew up wanting a Z with the roof out, that’s a trip worth planning.
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