HIGH ROAD
Taming Godzilla
Get a grip on the year’s hottest, most dynamic supercar, the new Nissan GT-R.
By HOWARD WALKER
There are a few things you can do to experience truly mind-blowing acceleration. You can put a call into Ringling Brothers circus and see if they have a job opening for the guy who gets shot out of the cannon. Or you could sign up for the Navy and work your way up to piloting one of those F-14 Tomcats that get catapulted off the deck of a carrier. Now that’s serious acceleration.
Or maybe you could buy yourself a top-fuel dragster and watch your belly button go from an outy to an inny under the warp-speed acceleration you get from 8,000 horsepower (relevant factoid: a top-fuel dragster goes from zero to 100 mph in 0.8 seconds).
If all those options sound just a little on the extreme side, you might want to consider the outrageous new GT-R supercar from Nissan, the car they call Godzilla.
Powered by a twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter V6 that cranks out a supposed 480 horsepower—independent tests show closer to 530 horses—the all-wheel-drive GT-R has the legs to lunge from standstill to 60 mph in a manic 3.5 seconds.
The GT-R may not be the fastest accelerating production car out there—the 1,001-horsepower Bugatti Veyron, with its 2.5-second blast from zero to 62 mph, wins that little contest. But the Nissan has the Veyron nailed on price. The Bugatti will set you back $1.4 million, but you can have the Nissan for a mere $71,900.
You’ve probably heard about the new GT-R. After all, since the wraps came off it at last October’s Tokyo auto show, it’s been on more magazine covers than Brad and Angelina combined. Part of the fanatical interest is the car’s cult status among teen fans of the video game Gran Turismo, where previous generations of the GT-R were the star. That’s where the nickname Godzilla came from.
To live up to the GT-R’s computer-animated image, the engineers at Nissan set out to create the ultimate techno tour-de-force, house-on-fire supercar. A car that could outperform the Porsche 911 Turbo, which Nissan used as its performance benchmark.
See it in the metal and it’s not exactly pretty. Kind of in the same way Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men isn’t pretty. Brooding, powerful and menacing, yes; cute—uh, no.
The full text of this article is available in the July/August 2008 issue of Palm Beach Illustrated. Order now.
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