Teh Car Blogz

If there’s one vehicle (besides the gawdawful Chevrolet Volt EV thing) that’s been hyped, overhyped, and überhyped by the press, it’s got to be the new Nissan GT-R.  It’s the latest in a long line of all-conquering Nissan rocketships, that were previously based on the old-fashioned Skyline chassis.  For an example of an early GT-R, read this post.  The new GT-R, which drops the Skyline prefix, is significant for many reasons.  Most importantly, it’s the first GT-R that is officially being imported to the USA - previous Skylines had to come in through a number of sketchy importers, including MotoRex, who collapsed amidst all sorts of legal trouble.  For more information on MotoRex’s sad story, there is a decent Wiki which can be found here.

Patrick (some call him “Steve”) and I were given the opportunity to ride in a new GT-R by a very generous owner in Raleigh, NC.  It was a brief impression, but obviously this is a GT-R - there is more than enough to write about.  More details below the jump.

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I spotted this rare bird while out over the memorial day weekend with my friend Paul.  In order to protect the location of this exceedingly rare car, I’m going to refrain from providing any specific location.  Suffice to say, it’s somewhere in Raleigh.

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Since I first understood a thing about cars, I’ve been a fan of the Colin Chapman school of automotive design. Chapman, for those not in the know, was the founder of a little sports car marque called Lotus. His basic design idea was “add lightness.” Extraneous components were not needed or welcome. It has been said that he would continue to remove material from a component until it failed, then add a little back in, and move onto the next one. This obsession with weight was obvious in the cars he made. Drive a Lotus Esprit and you can’t have a heavy right foot - the gas pedal hinge will bend under your foot. You want carpet in your Elise? The Porsche dealer is down the road, you wuss.

The reason for this isn’t hard to understand. Let’s break it down. What makes a car fast is, basically, it’s power-to-weight ratio: how many pounds is each horsepower burdened with? The less weight and the more power, the faster a car is going to accelerate (in a nutshell.) So there are two ways to make a car faster: add more power, or subtract more weight.

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One thing I’ve noticed about car magazines in the US (besides the boring ones like Consumer Reports) is that above anything, they like to emphasize acceleration as a defining characteristic of a car’s worth. It’s not hard to notice. On the front cover of the latest Car and Driver, they have a few headlines. The big one proclaims “The Fast Lane!: BMW 135i, 0-60 4.7s.” Further down there’s “Nissan GT-R 0-60 3.3.” At the bottom, in small font is “The Slow Lane: Smart ForTwo, 0-60 14.4s.”

Let me be the first one to say: Who gives a shit how fast a Smart Car gets to sixty miles an hour? No one’s going to be drag-racing from light to light in their Smart. A Smart is an economical fashion accessory, like a Swatch (imagine that!) It’s a conversation piece. It’s the new Prius. The only people racing smarts are the ones with Smartuki conversions, so all three of them. The 0-60 time on a Smart is about as relevant as the fuel efficiency of a dump truck.
But this is America, where we have (comparatively) cheap gas, the roads are wide and straight, and if you’re not going 80 on the highway, you’re getting run over. So magazines shout about how fast a car can reach 60 - which is a pretty arbitrary number.

There are a lot of fast cars out there. But let me let you in on a secret: some of them really, truly suck.

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