The Nissan GT-R

One of the reason's I started this blog was to put my considerable opinions of automobiles into print. What better car to start with than the hugely (and deservedly ) hyped "successor" to the Skyline, Nissan's new GT-R. Let me preface all of this: I've never driven the GT-R. I've never driven any of the cars it's compared to. That doesn't mean I can't have an opinion. :)

The big number that car geeks will be familiar with is 7:29. That's the time (yes, minutes, smart-ass) it takes a GT-R to complete a circuit of the famed Nurburgring. That is damn impressive. Faster than a Porsche Carrera* Turbo. At half the price. I guess that's the little number to complement the big number (If you consider 70 large little).

Here's the number that I can't shake: 3900. That's the weight in pounds of this beast. That's a lot of pounds. Somehow, I can't get my head around how a car this heavy can go this fast without there being some caveat - are the tires only going to last for 100 miles? Yet I shouldn't be so critical. Perhaps my favorite car, enough so that I actually own it, is the 928, which was widely criticized for the same reasons the GT-R is today. It's big, it's heavy, it's not a true sports car (ok, maybe they aren't saying that about the GT-R). But the 928 outperformed the 911. Sound familiar?

Nissan figured out a way to make it go like stink. I shouldn't obsess over it's weight. So I should focus on the real reason not to get one: It's heinous. The exterior is just bad, but the interior, what you'll have to look at all the time, is atrocious. Does it matter how fast it goes?

*check for a future post on this.