The R35 Nissan GT-R Humbled its Haters and Earned My Respect, It Should Have Yours Too

This wasn't just an ordinary R35 Nissan GT-R, mind you. What pulled up next to me at a stop light that day was a full custom job, decked out with what looked like a vibrant carbon fiber wrap with matching dark grey wheels and a menacing duckbill rear spoiler of some kind. I wish I could have whipped out my phone real quick and shown all of you what it looked like. But I decided not to majorly weird out the guy behind the wheel with the left-hand window cracked halfway.

Anyway, this guy turns to me, rolls his eyes, then gives me a half-hearted wave before launching hard at the green light and is probably already doing 60 mph by the time my face reconfigures into a goofy, cheesy smile. Oh, and it definately had a better exhaust put on it too. But why the hell am I telling you all this? What's the gosh darn point? Well, hear me out for a second. I'm getting to it. It's because there was a time when I was a younger lad when I, as a red-blooded American muscle car fanboy, would have rolled my eyes at an R-35 GTR, not the other way around. But you know something? I was dead wrong back then, and because the R-35 is about to end its production any day now, let me tell you why.

I mean, it was pretty easy to make fun of the R-35 Nissan GTR if you'd been indoctrinated to believe non-Domestic American cars are the equivalent of the automotive antichrist. You might be tempted to think muscle car fans hate the GTR-R for outright xenophobic reasons. While we can't deny that might account for a minuscule fringe of modern car culture, it ain't the frickin' 1970s anymore. Instead, it's the unavoidable truth of the R35 GT-R, and every generation of the Skyline GTR since the R32, being inconsolably tied to computers, sensors, and electronic gadgets, that explains why many muscle car fans can't stand the thing.

From the moment the R35 hit drag strips across America in 2009, they've been absolutely walking competitors in their Camaros, Corvettes, Hellcats, Mustang GT500s, and just about every domestic sports car out there, while slack-jawed spectators sit seething in the crowd as their hometown heroes get humbled. It's a tradition that'll be going 15 years strong by the time Nissan wraps up the R35 GR-R's production run in the near future. Indeed, it feels almost unfair that a mega-computerized, all-wheel-drive Playstation console on four wheels can sprint to 60 mph in as little as 2.9 seconds as of the 2024 model year.

Heck, even the 2009 GT-R R35 that started it all blitzed the zero to 60 sprint in 3.3 seconds back when Car & Driver first tested it, what seems like ages ago. Keep in mind; there isn't a V12, a V10, or even a V8 under an R35's hood. Just a 3.8-liter V6, two beefy turbochargers, and enough computer horsepower to satisfy the Space Shuttle Discovery if they ever decide to pull it out of retirement. It's exactly because this kind of blistering performance is achieved with an engine most North Americans would call a washing machine that ticks off people across the continent in their Italian and German sports cars or American muscle cars.

Just think about how many all-time great European and American sports cars are slower than this nearly 4,000 lb (1,814.7 kg) leviathan with a V6. All the Lamborghinis, Ferraris, BMW Ms, Mercedes AMGs, and the above-mentioned Hellcats and Corvettes. But it's a fact the R35 is built with precision and a minuscule tolerance that begs belief that's at the heart of why it's so world-beating quick. As Jeremy Clarkson showed us when Top Gear tested the R35, each GT-R's VR38DETT V6 engine put in every GT-R R35 has been hand-assembled in a hermetically sealed production facility so that every step of its construction is supervised by the well-trained eyes of some of Japan's most skilled engineers. All while its electronic brain can make micro-adjustments to the all-wheel-drive system every 1/100th of a second, and that was back in 2009. It's even faster nowadays.

It's this extra bit of dedication to the finer details of what makes an automobile objectively quicker that American sports cars and even some European ones sometimes leave to the side that forms so much of what people both love and hate about the current generation of the GT-R. The fact that mighty Chrysler Hellcat V8s and Ford Coyote V8s, and even GM LS/LT V8s routinely find themselves huffing R35 exhaust both on the track and at the strip is what makes it not just one of the most polarizing sports cars built in Japan but anywhere in the world, ever. But you know something? After you're done huffing weapons-grade "copium" about how the GT-R blitzes all your favorite sports cars, people tend to grow up a bit.

I can't speak for everybody, but I get the impression as zoomers especially come of age, they start to appreciate the raw numbers the R35 GT-R was able to produce rather than have a knee-jerk reaction to the thing kicking their childhood heroes in the nads at the quarter mile. After being around for almost a decade and a half, and with ICE cars in general going the way of the dodo pretty soon, the GT-R feels like an old friend these days. As the R35 reaches the twilight of its production run, now is as good of a time as ever to look back on things with a more objective point of view.

The R-35 GT-R is one of the all-time great internal combustion-powered sports cars of the 21st century. If you ask me, it's had a more long-lasting and prolific reach by this stage than even its movie star predecessor, the R34 Skyline GT-R. The reason why is that the R34 only stayed in production for five model years.

Five ultra-glorious and historic years they may have been, but by 2024, the R35 GT-R will have had a production run three times as long. Depending on when Nissan kills production for good, it might even be a bit more than triple the production run when all is said and done.

In the same way annoying online political pundits try and assassinate your brain with "facts and logic," the Nissan GTR-R beat down its haters with relentless lightning-quick quarter-mile times and even faster track times. It's as if when the R35 debuted, it was like Michael Jordan fresh out of UNC in his rookie year with the Bulls.

But in 2023, the R35 is like MJ with the Washington Wizards, still playing just for the love of the game and still pretty damn great at what he does. In the same way that MJ dunking from the free throw line is something you always remember, we won't forget the way the R35 laid waste to just about everything under the sun and long after ICE vehicles became illegal to manufacture anymore and everything on the road is electric and silent.

With all this in mind, is it any wonder I cheesed out like a 19-year-old girl at a Taylor Swift concert when a super-clean custom R35 pulled up next to me one day? If you fault me for it, I only say that the numbers don't lie. If you still think the Hellcat Demon is faster, at least learn to launch the thing properly.