2015 Nissan GT-R Premium Delivers Life-Changing Performance

Nissan GT-R occupies a sliver of market white space atop the Japanese tuner car field, a natural terminus for the sensibilities of Subaru WRX STI and Mitsubishi EVO owners whose youth or self-image prevent transition to an Audi RS 7 or Mercedes-AMG sedan. But that white space yields the consumers every car company desires: 70-75 percent of GT-R owners are prosperous Gen X males, with another 20 percent Boomer males, a sprinkling of Gen Y filling out the 1100 to 1200 buyers who claim a $100,000+ GT-R each year.

A front-mid-engine slab-sided wedge, when parked in dappled light on our pea gravel drive, GT-R has a quiet, even peaceful presence. Until of course one notices the 20-in. RAYS alloy wheels, the fat 285/35 rear Dunlop tires, Brembo brakes bigger than dinner plates, and bodywork that sits little more than the breadth of two fingers off the tires. This is the automotive equivalent of a weapon. Purposeful, clean industrial design free of any pretense or esthetic flourish, GT-R reminds of a Remington Marine 12-gauge pump shotgun, or a finely forged Medieval battleaxe one might find in the Department of Arms and Armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In short, you don’t want to pick a fight.
Because GT-R lineage traces to a mass-market sedan, there’s ample leg and shoulder room, enough for a quarterback or a tight end. The downside to its humble DNA is a curb weight of 3851 pounds. GT-R is no svelte dancer like its European rivals, tipping the scales at more than two tons with driver and passenger aboard. GT-R is all about measurables, performance metrics, its bottom-line performance achieved through brute force and considerable mechanical thrashing. Don’t expect the subjective delights of a thoroughbred exotic. European V8s, V10s and V12s are operatic, turning any drive into a Wagnerian event to stir the soul. GT-R does not care for such side benefits.

GT-R Premium at a favorite mountaintop.

To air out GT-R as best one can on public roads, twice we aimed its blood red hatchet nose up a favorite canyon. Early afternoon, Halloween’s impending rainstorm settling against our nearby mountain range in a foggy gloom, there were few other travelers on the road to interfere with our amusements.
From a standing start, squeeze down hard on the throttle and about three seconds later GT-R hits 60 MPH. Four more seconds and the speedometer needle swings beyond 100 MPH. Acceleration is the most profound and easily demonstrated aspect of GT-R’s performance. For passengers accustomed to mainstream cars, a full-throttle launch from standstill can prove life-changing. Once you’ve been flattened against the seatback of a GT-R, no ordinary sedan or CUV ever feels the same.

Purposeful and brutal, GT-R attracts 1100 to 1200 young, prosperous buyers each year.

Sounds of the rear-mounted gearbox and transfer case, prop shaft, enormous tires chewing the pavement, and the resonating moan of a 545 HP twin-turbo V6 fill the cabin. With so much mechanical sound generated when traveling at full tilt, GT-R has an almost military character, in spite of the recent addition of noise cancellation through the Bose audio system. When toddling along a highway in traffic, GT-R is fury on a leash, but the sound is tolerable for trips of an hour or maybe two. Once the injectors start pumping vast quantities of gas into the engine and revs pass 3500 RPM, all hell breaks loose.
We should note that the customer delivery process for GT-R includes a step in which the buyer acknowledges the sound of the dual-clutch transaxle, thus preventing complaints a few weeks later. Nissan blazed a path with this car, developed in the past decade, and pays the price of leadership. GT-R’s 6-speed is not as refined as the 7-speed Getrag found in more recently engineered German cars. Stand next to GT-R at idle, and one thinks of a cement mixer with a heavy load of gravel. Understand that the gearbox is stout and durable, and only shifts with recalcitrance when fired up on a cold morning. If you want subtlety, shop elsewhere.

It’s a proper close-ratio gearbox, too, with fifth gear a one-to-one direct drive. Only sixth gear is a pronounced overdrive, to help fuel economy ratings. First gear is super-low, explaining GT-R’s ability to outsprint almost any car in the first 60 feet. With GT-R, you will almost always have the jump on any challenger. Unlike the good old days, when launching a car aggressively at a drag strip required considerable talent balancing throttle and clutch, with a dual-clutch transmission, sidestepping the brake and tramping the throttle results in a brutal launch that almost any driver can replicate.
Except for the wearing sound of the transaxle, which Nissan should consider replacing with the aforementioned Getrag, GT-R can serve as a daily supercar for the most devout performance enthusiast, or on a long road trip. Harmonics, vibrations, road noise, yes, they are plentiful. But GT-R’s trunk is big enough to handle a week-long trip for two clothes horses. For anyone short of a fanatical street racer, though, GT-R is best as a second, third, or seventh or eighth car in the garage.
Steering is well sorted if not a lyrical experience. One feels the power shooting to the front wheels, which reinforces that military sensibility.

GT-R’s front seats are heavily bolstered, holding torso and hips in place. The door panels and center 

tunnel have soft points where a driver can brace knees when cornering hard.

As with any high-performance car of the past ten years, exploring the car’s outer limits on the highway can result in jail time. Talk to GT-R owners and they will speak about a touch of off-throttle oversteer when pushing hard, the rear tires coming loose, the chassis rotating, which is helpful when bending around corners as quickly as possible. But it can surprise the uninitiated who think technology will save them from acts of stupidity. If you’re going to pick up the weapon, you had best understand how it functions and what it can do, and know your own limitations. This car is not a toy.
Many a GT-R devotee invests in a second set of wheels for gummy track tires, and fully exercises GT-R at a track day event. Which brings us to GT-R NISMO, a new offering for 2015. With 600 HP, this newly introduced $150,000 version of GT-R is a no-compromise beast that will extend the GT-R’s legend a few more years. It’s slightly quicker than the standard road-going GT-R, but sensations are more intense.

2015 GT-R NISMO has 600 HP, carbon body elements and a more aggressive character.

As with most other designs in the Playstation Gran Turismo Vision collection, the Nissan Gran Turismo 2020 hints at a future when GT-R might finally break completely free of any plebian Nissan ancestry and become a pure supercar. It’s not hard to imagine the next GT-R as a hybrid, a twin-turbo V6 supplemented with a small battery pack and a large electric motor integrated at the back of the engine or into the transaxle, providing “torque fill,” meaning the electric motor delivers instant-on thrust for a short period of time till the gasoline engine reaches full song. In short, the type of system used in LaFerrari, McLaren P1, and the Porsche 918, and similar to the powertrain expected in the upcoming Acura NSX.

For now, GT-R represents the best value for money in the high-performance world. Starting early next year, that position will be challenged by the Corvette Z06, which will list for under $100,000, though of course dealers will tack on premiums to boost profit. Throughout 2015, expect to hear endless chatter about the many battles between GT-R and Z06.

Source: forbes

Nissan UK Sports Car Chief: GT-R Hybrid is the “Obvious Direction”

Nissan UK sport car chief James Olvier told Top Gear that a GT-R Hybrid is the “obvious direction,” indicated that it could look much like the CONCEPT 2020 Vision GT

As I wrote back in September, there are a great many signs indicating that the next-generation GT-R will inevitably carry a lot of the visual hallmarks of the CONCEPT 2020 Vision Gran Turismo from this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. It’s also been suggested that there could be a 700+-horsepower hybrid version on the table. Both of these tid bits sound like great things, and they sound even better—and even more likely—in light of comments made to Top Gear by  Nissan UK sports car division chief James Oliver.
“I think it [a GT-R hybrid] is the obvious direction,” Oliver said in an interview. “There’s been obsessive development of the GT-R over the years, and at some point we will move onto the next generation car. The overall market is looking at different methods of powering cars, and at Nissan we’ve got great expertise and investment of electric.”
So just how plausible is a GT-R hybrid? Oliver says that Nissan “already [has] the capability in terms of battery production and electric vehicle technology,” which suggests that all it’s going to take to make the GT-R hybrid happen is commitment.
Oliver also notes that the CONCEPT 2020 is a design study for the next-gen GT-R, and that Nissan intends to wring every last drop of performance out of the current-gen R35 GT-R up until its last breaths.
On a mostly-unrelated side note: Digital Trends also covered the story of the possible GT-R hybrid and a CONCEPT 2020-inspired face, offering the following headline:
In honor of Joan Rivers (let’s say), Nissan to give GT-R one final facelift
Oh, my. Can we talk? Can we talk?

Source: http://thenewswheel.com/

Introduce: Nissan GT-R 2015

Although the first Skyline GT-R from Nissan arrived in 1969, in the 46 years since, there have nearly been as many years without a GT-R as with. The first two generations were produced from 1969 to 1972, the next three generations stretched from 1989 to 2002, and the most recent (just plain GT-R in fact, not a Skyline GT-R) has so far run from 2009 to 2015.That's 25 years that the GT-R has been a member of the material world, and 21 that it has lived in purgatorio.

Yet out of those 46 years, the birth of the legend and cult of the GT-R happened primarily in five: from 1989 to 1994, when a chassis codenamed BNR32 – just plain R32 to its friends and enemies – with a 2.6-liter straight-six engine, stuck a defibrillator on the corpus motorsportus and ran a 600-horsepower, four-wheel-drive, four-wheel-steered blast of "Take that!" through the heart of Group A racing.

Sure, the KPGC10 and KPGC110 won 49 consecutive races in Japan from 1968 to 1972. Sure, the R33 (1995 – 1998) ran the winning streak of the R32 out to 50 victories in 50 races in Japan's N1 Super Taikyu series, and was the first production car to break the eight-minute mark at the Nürburgring. Sure, the R34 (1999 – 2002) was still a championship-winning car as well as the handsome, square-jawed evolution that you could finally take home to mom's crazy sister and your Playstation-addicted brother.

But it was the R32 that won its first 29 races in Japan and took the Group A championship four years in a row. It was the R32 that earned the nickname "Godzilla" in Australia by winning the 1,000-kilometer race at Bathurst two years in a row and the Australian Touring Car Championship three years in a row before the regulations were changed to excise it from competition. It was the R32 that won its class in the 24 Hours of Spa three years in a row. It was the R32 that spawned the production Skyline GT-R, the 276-horsepower Pegasus that bestowed race-ready ATTESA-ETS 4WD (Advanced Total Traction Engineering System for All – Electronic Torque Split) and Super-HICAS (High Capacity Actively Controlled Suspension) four-wheel steering upon the common man. And it was the R32 that did all this at half the price of a Porsche, and in just four markets: Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. It wasn't until 1997 that the R33 would begin to be imported to the UK.

The day after obsessively covering the Tokyo Motor Show we were given the briefest of chances to drive the new R35 GT-R and GT-R Nismo, super-coupes whose umbilici are plugged into the R32. More proof? It was the R32 that birthed the first Skyline GT-R Nismo edition, a road-legal homologation special with aero mods and one color choice: Gunmetal Grey.

Nissan said this new GT-R is more mature, and after our drive we're prepared to admit that's the case, as long as we define "mature." If the previous GT-R was an undomesticated tiger, Nissan has at least taught this one not to pee on the couch or carpets. But it would still like to warn you, "Don't make any sudden moves – that sets it off. And it can smell fear, so..."

What was needed wasn't "MOAR SPEED!", but an accelerated course in finishing school.

When engineers arrived at a fork in the development road for the 2015 GT-R, they didn't choose either path, they chose both. The GT-R had come to a point where its outright speed and 'Ring lap time couldn't be questioned; from a 7:29.03 in the 480-hp 2009 car, the 545-hp 2014 model had cut an 11-second chunk off of that and got it down to 7:18.60.

What was needed wasn't "MOAR SPEED!", but an accelerated course in finishing school. No longer the clattering, shunting mechanical bull it had been when it first arrived, buyers still had to sign paperwork at the dealer acknowledging that the coupe made an unexpected amount of mechanical noise. This was to keep them from driving their cars right back to the dealer believing they were broken just because of the built-in vehicular ruckus.

So development took the right fork, creating a hardened Nismo package that would stay hopped up on speed, and the left fork, creating a standard GT-R that would calm down, relax, chill out a bit.

In the standard car, much of the work was done on the suspension, the aim being to better balance the apportionment of load between the four wheels. It was given a longer stroke and a new front stabilizer, spring rates were adjusted, bushes were revised and the electronics controlling the shock absorber valves were recalibrated. The primary result of that was more grip, the secondary – and maturing – result was a smoother ride that didn't need antsy hands on the steering wheel in order to keep a straight line.

Changes made to the parts of the GT-R you can see are few and mainly cosmetic.

A new steering pump was installed that eased the force required for low-speed maneuvering. Braking gets a more linear response and better modulation. Body stiffness in the rear is increased through better manufacturing processes and even more accurate fitting. The 20-inch Dunlop Sport Maxx GT DSST CTT tires have a new compound, stiffer sidewall and a stepped tread block to cut down on road noise. The cabin benefits from about 22 extra pounds of sound-deadening material to shield it from that formerly boisterous driveline, and Active Noise Cancellation can be had if buyers order the Bose audio system.

With the focus on civilizing, changes made to the parts of the GT-R you can see are few and mainly cosmetic. The functional difference is a new headlight cluster with an Adaptive Front Lighting System that now includes four LED lamps – three low-beam and one high – accented by a dog-legged LED DRL. Beyond that, the four rear lights go from dotted LEDs to continuous strips, the side vent gets a different flourish, Gold Flake Red Pearl is the new exterior color (if you look closely at it you can see gold-tinted glass flakes), there's a pale ivory interior available and more stitching on the seats and around the shifter. Order the Black trim and you get a dry carbon rear wing mounted to a carbon trunk that shaves half the weight compared to the aluminum decklid.

The Nismo is a 600-hp mercenary that will take any job that makes it go faster.

Down that right fork you'll find the GT-R Nismo, the third Nismo-fied GT-R in the car's history after the original R32 and a 400-hp R33 Nismo 400R from 1997 (we're not including the R34 Z-tune, which was built by Nismo but remains a beast with a different philosophy). This is the 600-hp mercenary with 481-pound feet of torque that will take any job that makes it go faster.

Its body has been stiffened through the use of additional adhesives on the bodyshell around the door and backlight openings. Under the hood are two larger turbos from the company's GT3 racing program, better ignition timing control and a larger fuel pump. Getting that extra 55-horsepower to the ground is a suspension that has been comprehensively revised from the damping force control units on the custom Bilstein DampTronic dampers to its links, high-rigidity wheel-hub bolts and bespoke Dunlops.

It has a new, slightly wider front bumper, a strake on the cover under the engine, a larger rear spoiler and a longer, tapered rear end that adds 220 pounds of additional downforce at 186 miles per hour versus the standard car. And a Dark Matte Grey, the evolution of that old Gunmetal, is among its exterior palette of five colors. Those are the features – aided by an even sharper track package that will be available for the production car but that hasn't been officially announced and detailed yet – that helped it wallop the 'Ring in 7:08.679. And if you believe the insider info at Car Guide, it will hit 62 mph in 2.08 seconds.

The automotive equivalent of The Blue Screen of Death didn't come with a gentle warning and a countdown timer.

Inside are all the daily-driver race car features you expect from such an offering, like carbon-fiber-backed Recaros, Alcantara everywhere and a steering wheel dressed in Alcantara and a centering stripe.

Regrettably, the bifurcation of the GT-R line was a story we mostly had read to us and got little time to actually experience. Our stint in the more refined, standard car lasted for all of 30 minutes on smooth Japanese roads and we were held captive by a top speed of 80 kmh (about 50 mph). We haven't been inside a GT-R since 2008, when we drove the very first edition for a few laps around the Estoril circuit in Portugal, and our strongest memory of that is thinking, "No wonder these are getting hurled into buildings and ditches." In that car, being at the limit meant you had already exceeded your own limits because the computers were doing so much for you and allowing you to think you were in control. So, more accurately, when the computers had reached their limits, well, computers are binary; as with a real PC, the automotive equivalent of The Blue Screen of Death didn't come with a gentle warning and a countdown timer.

We call the 2015 car a potty-trained tiger because there's a millimeter-thin veneer of Sentra in steady-state, straight ahead cruising. The standard GT-R has a surprisingly thin steering wheel (unlike the pictured Black Edition), thinner than that in a 370Z. Drive it like a Sentra and it will practically behave like one – just swap the Sentra's economy engine note for tire noise and the slightest hints of driveline workings. Even the first few degrees of steering lock and brake pedal travel are thoroughly common.

It's an animal that has finally been taught how to stop snarling and bucking at the leash when it's just being taken for a walk.

Get past that veneer – which is easy to do because, remember, it's only a millimeter thick – and there's that slightly tamed big cat. Turn the wheel quickly more than ten degrees and the car doesn't turn, it pivots. Get past that initial brake pedal travel and, while response remains linear, it is nearly as stiff as the pedal in theFerrari F1 simulator in Maranello, the one used by Fernando Alonsoand Felipe Massa, a fact we're clear on because we were in that very simulator two months ago. Put the squeeze on the throttle and it'll drop two gears and bolt like it's afraid for its life.

It's supple enough, but it's more firm than supple. Even though it wasn't as composed or refined as the (more expensive) Porsche 911 GT3 we recently drove, we'd happily run it from LA to Vegas or Phoenix and enjoy that particular through-line of bass in its ambiance that signals powerful, and powerfully fast possibility. It's not distractingly noisy at all, but it sounds like the modern yet hardcore sports car that it is, the one that can do the 0-to-60 mph sprint in less than 2.7 seconds (that's the time for the 2014 model; Nissan hasn't released a 0-60 time for the 2015 yet except to say it's faster). What was perhaps most instructive was listening to other journos with experience of the R35 evolution talk about how refined this new car is. Every single time, the answer to our question, "Is this more refined than the current car?" was, "Oh yeah."

To us, it's an animal, but apparently it's one that has finally been taught how to stop snarling and bucking at the leash when it's just being taken for a walk.

If you're blessed with outstanding reflexes, you can get the GT-R Nismo to behave with an adroitness that belies its heft.

We were given an even more curt stint in the GT-R Nismo, consisting of four laps – the bookending ones for warm up and cool down – around the Sodegaura Forest Raceway. For a car that can do the Nordschleife in just over seven minutes and eight seconds, the 1.1-mile outside loop at Sodegaura was so short that it took three of our four laps to remember that what we kept thinking was the next-to-last corner was actually the final corner. What we can say is that it's massively fast, pin sharp and changes direction with phenomenal quickness and, if you're blessed with outstanding reflexes like the test driver we rode with after we drove, you can get the GT-R Nismo to behave with an adroitness that belies its heft.

We can expect a modest price increase when the GT-R goes on sale early next year, but even so, it will remain the supercar performance bargain. We think of it as the Corvette of the supercar world – unholy and undeniable performance, nice all around, and even though not as refined as the cars it can race and outrun it only costs about half as much and its performance is now easier to enjoy and access.

The GT-R's Chief Product Specialist, Hiroshi Tamura, said, "The GT-R encourages you to enjoy the remarkably high performance like a child would."

Source:autoblog.com