Thanks for adding a link here Gav.
Some people might wonder quite why I'm so 'exercised' regarding the concept, design, engineering and production of these cars, and perhaps why I seem so frustrated and forceful on the topic. The backstory is that - since I first became interested in these cars - I have always seen and read all that "Made For The USA" and "An American Car, Made In Japan" type narrative from the so-called Z gurus and historians. It just never made any sense to me - and from talking to some of the people involved in Japan I knew it wasn't accurate - but there's still not a week that goes by when I don't hear the echoes of that narrative in one way or another.
Yes, of course the massive potential market in North America - the USA and the West Coast in particular - was a KEY part of the planning for the Z, but it was not the whole story. Some of the USA-based Z 'gurus' have tried for many years to tell us that the USA market HLS30U 'Datsun 240Z' was the sole driver in concept, design and engineering, and that other markets and other variants were an afterthought. That is - quite simply - a lie.
The documents that my friend Kats Endo obtained from Hitoshi Uemura (chief engineer on the 'Maru Z' project) illustrate the fact that Nissan saw the new S30-series Z as a 'family' of models for domestic and export sales, that all of them were designed at the same time and that all of the different variants influenced each other. Anybody who knows the cars well enough should be able to see that already, but all that "Made For The USA" marketing talk got into the press from the very beginning and is now pretty much set in stone. Journalists repeat it in almost every new article.
Nissan took the Australian market seriously. They took the NZ market seriously too. These markets were not as easy for them as the USA market was, but they mattered. An Australian/NZ market variant of the Z was part of the plan from the beginning. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.