New GT-R bursts from virtual reality to reality

Dan Carney • E-mail

It was always the button that activated the saw blade on Speed Racer’s Mach 5 that I liked. Forget the overused “jump over the bad guy’s car” button. Who needs that when you have the “cut the bad guy’s car in half” button?

Clearly Nissan’s engineers were influenced by the old Japanese TV show (and now movie) in building the GT-R, arguably the most eagerly awaited new vehicle of the 2009 model year.

The 2009 GT-R is set to debut in the United States next month, and while there’s no button for a saw or one that will launch the car into the air, there are buttons to adjust the shocks and stability control and displays for steering position and performance data.

The GT-R is the first such model sold in the U.S., but the car, which has been around for 40 years, has a fanatical following among young American drivers because of its incredible performance in the popular Gran Turismo video game.

To cement the connection between game and road, virtual reality and reality, Nissan designers added an interface that lets GT-R drivers electronically adjust various settings and review performance parameters on the dashboard. The system was designed in conjunction with programmers who work on the Gran Turismo game to ensure maximum familiarity to gamers who have presumably now grown up and found jobs.

A row of three toggle switches across the middle of the dash center stack each provides three different settings for the transmission’s shift program, the stiffness of the electronically adjustable shock absorbers and the leeway permitted by the electronic stability control system before it intervenes to maintain control of the car.

Above that, at the top of the dash, the multifunction display exhibits 17 different performance parameters, giving drivers the ability to see data to back up their bragging, with the computer confirming the number of lateral G's of cornering force or displaying the steering angle and throttle position.

Nissan Nissan’s new GT-R has a heavy emphasis on electronics.

All of this is pretty difficult to review in real time while driving, so the driver can plug in a memory card to download data from the car and review it on a computer in spreadsheet form.

With this heavy emphasis on electronics, data, specs and gadgets, it might be easy to forget that the GT-R is a car, with real attributes when driven in the real world. As promised, the car is docile and friendly at parking lot speeds, with no stiff clutch pedal to wear out the driver’s left leg.

Under way, the 3.8-liter twin-turbo-V6 engine pulls forcefully, with a character that is most similar in delivery to that of the Porsche 911 Turbo. Also like the Porsche, the wide front tires tend to tramline, following pavement seams and imperfections, so the tires tug at the steering wheel and cause the car to wander a bit at low-to-medium speeds.

Unlike the 911, however, this tendency diminishes with speed, so the GT-R conveys confidence-inspiring stability at high speeds, while the 911 hunts around in the lane in a way that erodes confidence that the car is doing exactly what the driver wants.

All-wheel-drive systems recently have become much more sophisticated, actively channeling power as needed to prevent intrusion on the car’s handling characteristics. This lets the four-wheel-drive GT-R handle more like a race car than a 4x4, which is a marked improvement over earlier AWD supercars such as the Lamborghini Murcielago. That car suffered distinct understeer on corner turn-in because of the power coursing through the front tires, but the GT-R dials most of the power to the rear under those circumstances, leaving the front tires free to steer more precisely.

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