HARDLY a model year goes by without the debut of at least one new car that sets off a frenzied run on dealers’ showrooms. In the last decade, introductions for vehicles as disparate as the Volkswagen New Beetle, Chrysler PT Cruiser, Mini Cooper and Ford GT each resulted in months-long waiting lists, accompanied by gigabytes of Internet speculation.
Nissan plans to import 2,500 GT-Rs this year and about 1,500 annually in the future.
So far in 2008 that must-have car seems to be the Nissan GT-R, a 480-horsepower sports coupe with all-wheel drive and a full-time cheering section. It will be available in the United States in June, starting around $70,000. Nissan plans to import 2,500 GT-Rs this year and about 1,500 annually in the future.
Typically, the cars that set off these stampedes carry names steeped in history or, at the least, a design that gestures to a beloved icon of the past. Why, then, is a car whose predecessors Nissan has never sold in the United States proving such a phenomenon?
The 2009 GT-R may be the first car whose reputation was forged primarily in the virtual world, at least in the minds of young American enthusiasts. The GT-R is a mainstay of leading video games, notably the Gran Turismo series that Sony PlayStation fans devote hours to, and was a featured star of a promotion that linked the introduction of the actual GT-R at the 2007 Tokyo auto show with the release of a special prologue edition of Gran Turismo 5.
To a much smaller group of fans in the United States — those who follow international sports car racing series — the GT-R is a high-performance hero of long standing, a car closer to meeting the definition of a supercar than any earlier effort by a Japanese automaker.
While sports cars like the Toyota 2000GT and Acura NSX were memorable, they did not attain the same level of performance — or incite the same degree of lust — as European exotics. The GT-R could be different.
The GT-R comes by its reputation honestly, having matured from Skyline models that trace their roots back to the late 1960s. The first GT-R version of the Skyline made its debut in 1969, lasting only a few years before oil shocks put the whole idea on hiatus.
Though it was nearly two decades before the model name reappeared, the GT-R’s reputation went on to worldwide recognition, mainly on the strength of its racing successes in Japan and Australia. (Until now, the GT-R was sold only with right-hand drive.)
Driving a GT-R a few years ago (the fourth-generation R34 model produced in 1999-2002 that had a role in “The Fast and The Furious” films) I came to appreciate this special machine as the automotive equivalent of a samurai sword. It seemed to be something created with such intense focus and precision that it generated its own presence.
Nissan uses the sword metaphor to describe the latest GT-R, too, pointing to the “aero blade canopy” of the passenger cabin’s roofline and describing the curved form of the rear roof pillar as a sword edge.
William Scott Wilson, a Florida-based writer and teacher who lived in Japan and has translated classics like “The Book of Five Rings” by the 17th-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, helped put the Japanese design discipline into perspective for me. Mr. Wilson recalled living in a village of craftsmen in Japan and visiting an 80-year-old sword maker, where he learned the history of the curved samurai sword, or katana, developed in the 10th century by folding and tempering steel many times to create a razor-sharp edge on a flexible blade.
“When a man makes a sword, there’s kinetic energy in the steel — a spirit of deep respect for what the swordsman is doing that infuses his product,” Mr. Wilson said. “By the time it has been tempered and washed, the sword gets the spirit of the man.”
Part of what makes the new GT-R so special may be the spirit of the research and development team inside Nissan that developed the car’s technology.
The designers are a tight-knit group. Peter Bedrosian, Nissan’s North American product manager for the GT-R, said. “They all wear special badges and sign secondary nondisclosure forms.
“Everything has to be perfect on these cars,” he said. “They took great pains to keep this new car a secret. We’ve had V.P.’s go to Japan, request to see the model and be told they can’t.”
The association of the GT-R with the video game world turns out to be a two-way relationship.
Not only did Nissan give GT-R data to the Sony PlayStation designers and the software developers at Xanavi Information to make sure the cars in the Gran Turismo games would be accurate, the game producers returned the favor, helping to create the car’s 11 instrument panel display screens.
Mr. Bedrosian said this relationship provides a link between generations.
“If you’re over 30, you have to be a real car nut to know about the GT-R,” he explained. “If you’re under 25, Gran Turismo has exposed you to it already.”
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