Part of it is the gas prices..... The other part is that there were TONS of surplus CA18DET's lying around when the SR came out...

There were also lots of KA stuffs as well....

Nissan looked at 2 places to distribute the CA powered 180's and those canidates were..

A: USA
B: Europe

SO... They looked at the american market.... Lots of people who drive automatic transmissions, have no care for fuel economy (this is relative to the rest of the world) , and have torquey domestic competition...

Europeans on the other hand mostly drive manual cars, and love fuel economy due to their expensive petrol...

The CA18DET would be an absolute dog with an automatic coupled to it, so it was decided for the CA to go to europe, where its smaller displacement and manual transmission could be used effectively. Another smaller reason was no re-engeneering of under the hood components for the European 200sx (CA powered) due to the fact that it would stay RHD instead of having to be re-engeneered for LHD. If ya saw martin's old 180, he had a lot of things moved around under hood, for nissan it was just easier to move stuff under the hood of a KA powered car due to the lack of turbo plumbing.

KA also isnt that bad coupled with an automatic transmission due to the displacement and torque, and gas mileage not being a main factor....