It’s hard to believe it’s finally happening, but the Nissan GT-R is now on its way out in its home market of Japan. Since intensity often fades with time, it’s easy to forget the stranglehold this thing had on the culture in 2008, as it truly was a landmark machine that influenced an entire era of performance cars. At the same time, the path this once-giant-slayer took over the past 18 years draws parallels to Nissan’s own situation. If you want to know part of the reason why Nissan seems desperate for a merger, just look at the history of the R35.
Hang on, didn’t the R35 GT-R already shuffle out of showrooms? In North America, yes. The last year for Nissan’s turbocharged all-wheel-drive monster on this continent was 2024, although a handful still linger in showrooms because the market for a new car unveiled during the Dubya years is slim and some dealers just can’t stop marking stuff up. However, in Japan, the R35 lived a little bit longer.
In fact, it’s still alive, but barely. Nissan has announced on its Japanese consumer website that it’s closing the order books for the R35 GT-R with the following message:
We have received many orders for the Nissan GT-R, and we have now finished accepting orders for the planned production quantity.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our many customers for their patronage over the years since its release in 2007.
Damn, 2007.
The world sure looked different back then. The first iPhone launched, and seemingly everyone on the hype train immediately downloaded an app that make it look like they were drinking a fake beer, chiefly because iOS was very much in its early days. Consumers first encountered the wrath of Windows Vista. Tumblr was launched to the public, and by the public, I mean fandoms. Ringtone rap was big, guitars were still heard on the radio, and, um, R. Kelly appeared on the year-end Billboard singles list. In some ways, we’ve made significant progress since then, even if the current landscape of algorithms and TikTok-friendly songs that fall apart after the hooks still leave room for complaints.
It’s a similar deal in the world of cars. When the current Nissan GT-R launched, it ushered in a whole new era of performance cars, the turbocharged all-wheel-drive quick-shifting automatics. At the time, the Porsche 911 Turbo featured either a six-speed manual or a Tiptronic slushbox, which left the dual-clutch Nissan GT-R in a league of its own.
While never a delicate car, it served up devastating results to the competition, and quickly became the blueprint for next 18 years. These days, you can get an automatic, all-wheel-drive, turbocharged BMW M3 that’s a world away from the high-revving, rear-wheel-drive, V8-powered model that entered production in September 2007.
So, has the GT-R-ification of an entire industry improved the breed? Objectively, it could be argued so. Advancements in output, chassis development, and tire technology mean that new cars are faster than ever, laying down monster straight-line figures and offering significant skidpad grip.
An eleven-second quarter-mile time used to be genuine supercar stuff, and now a BMW X5 M SUV will hang with an early GT-R through the quarter-mile. What about subjectively, though? The subjective aspects of a great performance car — drama, feedback, and involvement — are harder to find than ever before. Cheaper performance cars like the Mazda MX-5 and Hyundai Elantra N still have it, and upper-echelon rarities like the Porsche Spyder RS and Lotus Emira still focus on making the driver feel special, but most cars that follow the GT-R formula don’t feel like they love their drivers back.
I’ve touched on this before, so allow me to posit something new: The demise of the GT-R is also a sign that the old Nissan is pretty much over. Just like how BMW seems to build fewer Ultimate Driving Machines than ever before and Dodge is no longer the Hemi brand, Nissan isn’t the out-there brand it used to be. There won’t be another Infiniti FX45, the new Z is a retread of a two-decade-old platform, the brand sells no hybrids in America, and the early lead built by the Leaf simply wasn’t capitalized on. As the GT-R stagnated, so did Nissan itself.
It’s a shame because beyond the GT-R, Nissan was at the forefront of some innovative stuff in the 2000s that changed the industry for better or worse. Beyond building the modern performance car formula, Nissan carried wider adoption of carbon fiber reinforced plastics, like the driveshaft in the 370Z and the radiator support in the G35. It brought features like xenon headlights and a heated steering wheel out of the luxury brand realm and into the Maxima. It gave BMW a serious bludgeoning with the Infiniti G35, at a time when BMW was arguably at its engineering peak. It was the first brand to go big on CVTs, while many other mainstream cars offered four-speed or five-speed automatic transmissions. It’s not always an improvement, but innovation drives success.
In a way, the GT-R is a symbol of why Nissan’s in a bit of a state right now. Like much of Nissan’s lineup, it was updated with new materials and creature comforts, but the bulk of the engineering underneath is familiar to anyone who’s been into cars for quite a while. Just as the GT-R ceded ground to the competition and found itself in a tricky cost-benefit situation, Nissan finds itself in a precarious position right now. Outside of the e-Power hybrid tech used overseas, it’s low on seriously compelling product, and its corporate withering is largely its own doing. While we don’t yet know how Nissan will find its way out of this one, a new GT-R would be the apex of a potential resurgence, wouldn’t it?
Top graphic image: Nissan
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Great car. Beat most vehicles off the line…
Any known high mileage examples existing?
The next one should be a Corvette ZR1 competitor (should use it as a benchmark)…
Just thinking about it here, despite this car being on sale for 18 years, I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw one in the wild. I’ve seen R33/34 GT-Rs more recently. I’ve seen Ferraris, Lambos, MC20s, McLarens and GT3 911s in that time. Just odd. Are they all mothballed as “collectors items” waiting for the right day to roll out to Mecum?
I live in an area where it’s not uncommon to exotics on the road. Yesterday felt like spring, and I followed an Audi R8 and I was a couple cars back from an Aston for a while and spotted a Mercedes McLaren SLR while out on my first motorcycle ride of the year (of a decent distance – I ride year ’round when it’s 30 degrees and above, but decided to stretch my bike’s legs a bit). Lambos and Ferarris are genuinely common, as are McLarens and all flavors of 911s, GT3 included. I’ve only seen MC20s at dealers, though! We’ve got a Pagani and Bugatti dealer, but I’ve only seen one GT-R in the two years I’ve lived here. I don’t know if they’re too “low rent” for the old money folks or if they were “investments” and not driven.
When I lived in NH, a guy let me sit in his when my brother and I spotted the fabled Godzilla at a state rest stop/liquor store (NH is weird) in 2010. It was the first one I saw in the wild and a stranger let me plunk my ass down in it.
Eight years later, I saw my second – a guy was daily driving his on the same curvy, tree-lined road I commuted on. Rain, shine, or snow, I’d see him nearly every week. I loved that he was out there putting miles on his in the salt and grit and not mothballing it for Mecum. I hope he’s still got it and is rolling the proverbial odometer over still, collectors be damned.
I don’t have anything in common with the Lambo and Ferarri folks around here, but I’m so happy there was a guy who was almost assuredly commuting to work in what was a dream car for him. The GT-R always seemed to me to be the attainable super car and I’m bummed I don’t see more of them out there, being driven by folks who have to show up to work in the snow and don’t put on special shoes to drive it.
I see one at least weekly, but that’s mainly because the owner lives within sight of my son’s school and he wants to drive by and see it every time the garage door is open (he loves Skylines and the R35 is his very favorite car, not bad taste for 7).
To be honest, I’ve never lusted after an R35. It was an early adopter of everything I’ve come to loathe about most modern performance cars that value theoretical Nurburgring times over actually being able to have fun on the street, but still gotta respect it.
That being said, pour one out for Nissan that was, and we didn’t even get their best when they were at their ’90s peak. Even more than Dodge they feel like a once great car company that had great enthusiast offerings and were even dare I say part of the American fabric across a broad spectrum and now they’re becoming a nearly a laughing stock.
I never actually did wind up owning a Nissan but they’ve made a number of cars I’ve shopped and even came very close to purchasing a few: ’76 280zx (still kinda regret not buying this one), ’93 Maxima SE (fantastic car but had a high RPM stumble), ’96 Pathfinder (5 speed of course). I learned to drive stick on a friend’s ’88 Sentra, my wife learned to drive and took her drivers test on her parents ’91 Sentra. An ex had her first accident in a ’87 Maxima while I was belatedly teaching her to drive in college (it badly needed the steering rack replaced ). Still fondly remember squeezing in the back seat of what in retrospect must have been rare Sentra AWD hatch my mom got to have a better Montana winter driver after their Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra wagon ate several valves with well under 100K on the clock. Sigh.
The fascinating thing is that when it debuted it was a soulless pig full of electronics and Nissan pretentiously punching above its weight with things like “nitrogen tires” and the skilless launch control (before it became clear it destroyed transmissions). The “Playstation car,” lovingly designed hand in hand with the game development studio that took 5 years to port GT4 to the PSP.
Then when BMW was making the A90 the R35 was suddenly one of the biggest sticks of “classic JDM engineering” for people to beat it with.
Is it weird that I’ve always been a massive fan of Datsuns, but never liked Nissans?
I know they are one in the same, but around the time they changed their name over to Nissan in the US, I didn’t really care about any of their cars anymore. Still really don’t.
But, I’d happily chat for hours if you want to talk about the original 240Z “Fairlady”, 2000 Roadsters, or 510s.
I’m the exact same way. Nissan, to me, always represented low quality cars and trucks. No idea why. I’ve never owned one.
Nissan sold their soul to
the devilRenault in the pursuit of selling appliances that resemble automobiles. Then along came a savior,JesusHonda, willing to forgive all of their sins if they just repent and sign the papers, but alas, this was not to be and what we have now is a dead company still walking the earth, but with one foot already in Hell (I’m talking about the metaphorical construct and not the city in Michigan).At companies die. It’s what they do. Paraphrasing Moriarty but it’s true. Just google how many are gone in the last 50 years.
I’m not sure that’s entirely fair to Nissan as a whole. They’ve taken some pretty big swings technology-wise in the years since the GT-R released. Unfortunately, most of those swings have been spectacular whiffs, especially from a reliability standpoint (which is especially damning for a mainstream Japanese brand).
EVs? Yeah, the Leaf was first, but it also had air-cooled batteries that failed far too early in many cases and IMHO poisoned the EV well for a lot of buyers. CVTs? They went all-in and I think we all know how that went. Variable compression engines? An engineering marvel (I still can’t wrap my head around how the bottom end of those things work, even after I Do Cars tore one down) that has had exactly the level of reliability you’d expect from such a complex system (IIUC).
I’m hardly going to join the Nissan Defense Force or anything, but I don’t think it’s fair to criticize them for not doing any engineering. It’s more that they’re on the bleeding edge of a bunch of tech that didn’t work out the way they hoped.
A lot of companies do bleeding edge technology, but limit its risks to shield the overall company.
Did you know BMW had a hydrogen powered car in the early 2000s? Probably not because they made very few of them as real world test fleet and gave up on them when they didn’t work out. Same with their first electric car, a converted 2 series coupe. They didn’t put these technologies as the only option in their main production vehicles.
It’s kind of the difference between an innovation powerhouse or cautionary tale.
I thought Toyota was the first on Hydrogen….
But did you also know that BMW now makes their bearings out of wet cardboard, and they use the same material to make their valve seals, cooling pipes and every seal that’s supposed to keep oil in, even though they knew how to make those things last a few decades back?
That’s why ‘innovation powerhouse’ and ‘cautionary tale’ are not mutually exclusive concepts 🙂
Imagine it’s 2010 and you walk into a Nissan showroom, ready to plunk down $100k on a GT-R. Right next to it on the floor is a Versa for $9999. Would it make you stop and think?
Hmm. Chevrolet had the Aveo, which started at an MSRP of $11,695 in 2010 according to Auto Detective, and while I thought you could option out a Corvette ZR-1 that year for up to $100,000, it appears the ZR-1 started around $54k and topped out considerably south of 100,000.
That said, the Versa I drove felt considerably better than my buddy’s Aveo sedan, so it’s kinda hard to tell.
It’s kinda inductive of Nissan it’s self. 18 years is a very long model life. I guess they did do some changes but nothing too big. The same as their frontier before it got a redesign. It will exist in a weird place of automotive history where the computers are handling things but you are necessarily driving a computer like you do with BEV. I guess with the z there isn’t room in the lineup and who is paying 120k for a Nissan especially one that’s been around for 18 years.
No manual, no care. Also it drives itself. /yawn
I remember being a teenager when these came out and being extremely excited anytime I saw one in the wild, especially the first time ever. I still have the pictures I took on my first smart phone when I spotted my first one in a non-descript Hispanic restaurant parking lot.
Sadly, the minimal changes that were made to the platform throughout production and how souless they feel is what I have come to associate them with. They are scalpel like in their precision, but as I have grown I have found that precision to be my very issue with them and most other new cars. They drive themselves, and the owners oftentimes seem to have this air about them indicating they feel this is a result of their own talents which is very rarely the case. This was definitely influenced by the time I spent working at a performance shop which regularly had GT-Rs come through, and the apathetic feeling throughout the shop regarding them as a well performing appliance, versus an icon.
When I drove one, my overall impression was “why would you make something this fast so completely and utterly boring?”. Like driving a video game. Porsches are never boring.
As I have said in regards to EVs, and it applies to this car in spades too – if I just want my innards re-arranged by g-forces, a season ticket to Six Flags is a whole lot cheaper and safer, and similarly (not) involving.
I feel this in my soul. If I’m going to drive a fast car I want it to be something I have to respect and even fear to an extent. That way my skills grow with the car and learning how to tame it will be much more rewarding. If it’s so technically perfect I can instantly take it to an HPDE day at the local track and be one of the fastest cars there as an (relative, I’ve done a few track days but I’m hardly a track rat) amateur I don’t want anything to do with it.
Honestly it’s one of the reasons I traded my GTI in on my Kona N 3 years ago. The GTI is a fun car but due to all the electronic nannies and whatnot you really couldn’t go past 7.5/10. At least in stock for a street car through and through and you can never fully defeat traction or stability control. I had a DSG as well and the damn thing wouldn’t even let you hit redline in manual mode.
The N is a different beast. When everything is off, it’s OFF. It lift off oversteers out the wazoo if you’re not careful. It torque steers so hard it tries to rip the wheel out of your hands under hard acceleration. It rides like shit. It’ll let you bang it off the rev limiter and cut fuel to your heart’s content. It just feels way sketchier in all the best ways and it’s forced me to become a better driver.
I probably won’t have it for more than another year or two because it’s too small for our growing family but I’ll never forget it. I also won’t forget what driving a Camaro SS and the rear breaking free felt like, or nailing an overpowered car on a backroad and reaching to to jail speeds unintentionally the first few times felt like.
We don’t drive stat sheets, we drive cars.
I just don’t have much need for speed, but I have a need for a car that has *feel*. For me, my ’17 GTI Sport was a nearly perfect reasonably-priced daily driver (and I continue to kick myself for falling prey to Carvana’s ridiculous offer for it). If they made a long-roof GTI it would be perfect, it was just not quite long enough for some of my needs. I never once turned the nannies off – why would I? I owned a BMW M235i before the GTI – I found it boring as hell once it was in the States (good fun in Europe where you can stretch a car’s legs a whole lot more). Too much speed is just not interesting to me – there is a happy medium there. My 75hp (on a good day) Triumph Spitfire is a whole lot more fun than any car I have driven with 4-5X the horsepower. I had a Camaro SS as a rental once, I did not find it fun at all. Too much muchness.
I really have not much interest in going to tracks, and not at all in street cars, BTDT, probably can’t be bothered again. I have a friend with a garage full of Formula Fords and Formula Vs. – THOSE are the cars you want to take to a track, and as a bonus they are dirt cheap. And you don’t need one to get you home at the end of the day.
…and then you’ll sell it, calling it “cherry, never driven hard,” and someone else will get your ragged-out Hyundai.
It’s had all of its preventative maintenance on schedule (which is documented on the CarFax), it’s been in 0 accidents, has all of 16,000 miles on it after nearly 3 years, and other than some small bumps and bruises here and there it’s in great shape cosmetically.
It’s not “ragged out” at all lol. I mostly baby my cars…but I also don’t see the point of buying an affordable performance car and not having fun with it. It’s a goddamn Hyundai, not some rare Porsche or something. It’s not intended to be bubble wrapped and taken out once a year on a nice day.
…any car that has been consistently “banged off of the rev limiter” is going to be ragged out, regardless of preventative maintenance. In your post you spoke of hitting redline, hard acceleration, “nailing” an overpowered car, etc.
This is not even close to “mostly babying” a car.
Granted, it’s a Hyundai, and you can do whatever with it. I’m just saying that any buyer should be aware that purchasing a “performance” model of a cheap car should know what they’re getting into.
I would even like to drive your Kona N – I’ve heard second-hand that they’re a lot of fun.
All good amigo. They’re an absolute hoot. The ride definitely sucks but they’re so much fun it makes up for it. The steering is excellent, the DCT is about as good as you’ll get outside of German performance cars and supercars, and the 4 cylinder somehow actually sounds really good and has torque all over the power band which is rare for a small turbo mill.
They also handle like hot hatches…in fact it handles better than my GTI did. You really have to work to unsettle it and I put the “track capable out of the box” claims to the test twice…once at a more casual track attack day and once at a more serious HPDE day. It had no issues either time, although I did change the brake fluid after the HPDE day because the brakes got a bit spongy.
Somehow the pads, rotors, oil, tires, and pretty much everything else were perfectly fine. There’s another guy at the track I go to that also runs a Kona N and there are always Veloster Ns out there when I’m there as well. The performance per dollar ratio really can’t be beat if you can live with the refinement compromises.
Unfortunately I’m going to need a bigger car in the next few years so I’m really trying to enjoy the N while I’ve got it. Anyway, if you ever find yourself in the DMV I’ll gladly throw you the keys 🙂
I think right there^^ lies your problem.
I thrash my GTI on the track within inches of both our lives, hanging out with Porsches in corners. And I grew up racing karts, way before I knew how to drive on the road, so finding the limits of a car on track is the entire reason I’m there in the first place.
7.5/10? With a tune that pushes over 30psi of boost it’s making 70% more power and twice the torque from stock, that’s turning the dial to 10 and ripping the knob off.
I can definitely turn ever single nanny off, in fact if I don’t turn off stability control it would melt my rear brakes trying to brake the outside wheel in corners.
You can fault VW for many things, but I don’t think your poor choice of options on your GTI is one of them. I mean they gave us a closed deck iron block with forged crank & pistons and 3 pedals for a little over $25k. Tell me where else would you get that for the same money? Go ahead, I’ll wait.
I don’t get this argument with GTIs to be honest. I get that the people who love them REALLY love them and think they’re the greatest car ever. I respect it but if I have to tune something to make it good then I personally don’t think it’s all that good. I’m I’m spending the money on a new fun car I want it to be fun out of the box and I don’t want to have to do warranty-voiding things to get it to where I want it…ESPECIALLY warranty-voiding things on a VAG product.
My car had significant mechanical and electronic issues in the first 5,000 miles completely stock and my mom’s EA888 grenaded at 60,000 miles. More power to you if you want to shove 30 PSI of boost through that cast iron block but I don’t. And for what it’s worth new GTIs cost about 35k now. For that price I’d rather have a GR Corolla, one of the Ns (which I obviously chose), or a used FL5 CTR if I can find one that hasn’t been beaten within an inch of its life which is…a tall task to be fair.
And I’m not going to engage in the manual vs DCT pedantics. We’ve beaten that dead horse into its molecular state on this site and the last one. I don’t think wanting a car to give you actual manual control with a DCT is a big ask. Pretty much everyone except VW and Audi will let you have it.
Anyway enjoy the hell out of your GTI. I think they’re great little cars. I just think there’s way more competition now than there used to be and they’re not quite the undisputed class standard that they once were…but VW really fucked up with the MK8s. The 7.5 pretty much had the formula just right. Sometimes I miss mine for the civility it offered over my N but then I get on a decent backroad and more or less totally forget about it.
The R35 also has a lot of issues with rust from what I saw. We had a 2015 with 79k miles from New York come in and it was mechanically totaled from all the salt damage. This was in 2020. I have heard other complaints from people who live in areas that don’t salt also complaining of similar.
Thats news to me.
I know Corvettes have issues with rust as well. Same for Camaros….
Not sure about 2JZ Supras…
Interesting (and how throwback Japanese of them). Surprised that people drove them in the salt. Most of this sort of thing that aren’t Porsches live pretty sheltered lives.
The Nissan logo symbolize rising sun (or something along that) in Japan, but this is more of a sunset. They need to get their financials in order to give us the next generation for the new sunrise.
Twenty years ago, Nissan was thisclose to H & T, and blended the best of H driving dynamics with T reliability. Then, something happened.
Mazda and Subaru blew right by them. Nissan’s response was more and more mediocrity, to the point that they’ve become Korean.
Sad, sad, sad.
Carlos Ghosn is what happened. He pulled them back from the brink but should’ve been let go immediately thereafter. He was so obsessed with cutting costs that he allowed basically zero innovation apart from the Leaf and Murano CrossCabriolet.
Still really wish i could get one of these, but the prices have stayed nice and high
They’re also hilariously overpriced at MSRP
I’m often impressed but also saddened by just how expensive even the oldest models are. I would buy GTR long before I would ever think about any exotic or supercar. There’s something visceral and face punchy about them, in the spirit of Vipers. Even if other cars now come faster, the GTR still FEELS like that to me.
i have never driven one, but kept hoping i would see one come down to something a bit more affordable.
This car was either the beginning or the end depending on your perspective. I was a teenager when it came out and it’s hard to overstate how big of a deal it was, especially considering that we got it here in the States after years of the R34 being bedroom poster car forbidden fruit and a tooner icon.
At the time this really did eviscerate much more storied competition and in all honesty it was somehow still pretty competitive until the last couple of years. I do think that as an engineering exercise it’s a pretty damn special car and that it forced other manufacturers to up their game quite a bit.
That being said, as Thomas suggests…because of this we now have an endless stream of turbocharged all wheel drive sports cars that weigh 4,000+ pounds, offer cutting edge automatics, and can do 3ish second 0-60s and low 11/high 10 second quarter miles every single time without asking anything of their drivers. Literally anyone can activate launch control and replicate the numbers car publications get in their testing.
It’s definitely a double edged sword and unfortunately I think this car’s legacy is always going to be tied to what proceeded it…which is more or less an era of effortless but soulless speed. As long as you’ve got a big budget you can walk into any German luxury showroom and drive away in something that will go toe to toe with a GTR while coddling you and 3 adult friends in lavish luxury.
In a vacuum I love this car because of what it stood for at the time and how it was one of those rare non-supercars that managed to become a household name even amongst normies. But I do understand why people criticize it and what came after. Regardless, this could very well be the dying breath of Nissan and it’s a damn shame how far they’ve fallen.
For those of us about 10 years older, it was definitely a throwback to the 90s wars between 3000GT, RX-7, and Supra Turbo (honorable mention to SVX, I guess). At the time, most of those cars were sub-$40k; similarly, the entry-level GT-R almost 15 years later was introduced around $65k, IIRC — same basic idea, even though it was a lot bigger and heavier.
Today, I guess it’s only Dodge left doing this on any large scale.
I’m right in between you two. I was fresh out of college when this came out, and in my 20’s I ran in circles with a handful of guys who had GT-Rs. Godzilla was a darn icon and while a lot of purists hated the “Playstation supercar”, it absolutely turned heads and got respect. I still remember watching the yearly videos from Texas where the newest modded up GT-Rs would go toe to toe with the Gallardos on the drag strip. The R35 was the pinnacle of affordable performance, and I just enjoyed hanging around in its shadow (literally, at club meets and cruises) in my lowly Z33 while feeling awesome by association.
However, as the article points out… this story ultimately turned out to be a tragedy. The plucky Japanese brand I grew up loving is now no more. This truly feels like the end of an era for me personally.
I wouldn’t peg the GTR as beginning of the end, but the proliferation of what Ferrari was already doing at a far more visible level (e.g. with a mainstream brand) of moving away from manual transmission vehicles to ones which they could sell to anyone who brought them money without needing to learn (and make them more driveable).
Sometimes you got to rip off the band-aid. It was a good band-aid, even a very entertaining band-aid with a lot of fans who enjoy all that the band-aid has provided over it’s many years. The time has come unfortunately, as its edges are peeling up and it’s barely holding on. Good bye band-aid.