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Automotive News & Views Are The Japanese Poised to Dethrone the 911 AND the Z06?
194 messages, Last post on Nov 24, 2008 at 12:05 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: lemmer (Mar 17, 2008 7:26 am) That is an opinion. And you are entitled to it. But what you 'like' doesn't make you right. There is no 'correct' way to build a sports car. I'm not going to argue that the M5 isn't impressive. But I don't like big, heavy and luxurious. But I don't like spine-rattling fair-weather only cars either. I like the middle ground. I don't know why some people are drawn to extremes, translated: "It either has to be 5000lbs and soft suspension or 2000lbs and no suspension to speak of." No, its possible to split the difference. I think its better that way. I'm not basing my argument on my opinions. It is just a fact that there are heavy-yet-fast cars out there. I don't like them, but they exist.
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Replying to: bigmclargehuge (Mar 17, 2008 7:38 am) "Grand tourers differ from typical sports cars in that they are usually larger, heavier (sometimes more than 3,500 lbs), and tend to make less compromise in comfort for the sake of driving ability." I personally prefer to have one of each at any given time.
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Replying to: lemmer (Mar 17, 2008 7:55 am) But if the true definition of grand tourer is that it makes less compromise in comfort for the sake of performance, there are still some that do both and do both well. |
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Replying to: bigmclargehuge (Mar 17, 2008 8:09 am) But upon reflection of my comments, here's what I'm trying to communicate. I think Nissan could have "leap-frogged" the competition instead of this 1-2% better or worse, depending on which numbers you want to believe. With the hype at least on some of the forums, I expected something extraordinary. What I expect, and where I think Nissan really missed an opportunity on their ultimate performance car is: A car slightly shorter than the 350Z; lose the backseat. Keep the AC (manual), pw, pl, pm, and ditch the rest of the creature-comforts. Keep the AWD, the brakes and the engine. MSRP of $50K, with volumes in the 50K-100K to spread out and lower the development costs. Now that would be a car to get excited about. A smallish 3,000 Lb AWD car with 450+hp wouldn't have any competitiors.
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Replying to: kernick (Mar 17, 2008 8:33 am) That is hard to disagree with.
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Replying to: bigmclargehuge (Mar 17, 2008 8:09 am) To me, a GT is an everyday car that I can squeeze the kids into when needed. A sports car is the car that is fun for me alone on a nice day (maybe even for a track day). |
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Replying to: bigmclargehuge (Mar 17, 2008 6:07 am) I agree with this and it proves that Nissan is not trying to bring the highest-performing inexpensive exotic to market, because if they were, they would have benchmarked the GT-R against the Porsch GT3 RS rather than the Porsche Turbo. Maybe the F430 or Z06... |
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Replying to: bigmclargehuge (Mar 17, 2008 6:07 am) I'll likewise agree with this, and to make the heavier car perform as well as the lighter car, more power has to be added to the engine to compensate for the weight increase (note: COG also must be lowered. If not, all the increased power in the world will not help performance). Since the GT-R doesn't have this power increase despite a weight increase over the 3,100 lbs cars (3,900 lbs and 480hp versus 3,900 lbs and 600+hp), we can assume Nissan isn't interested in securing a prominent place on the Nurburgring or any other road course. |
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