I'm not sure if this has come up on the thread previously, but beware of the Nissan GT-R. New Model cars have 0-60 time under 3 seconds. Probably in the top 5 fastest street-legal cars on earth. One took me to school badly - passed me like I was going backwards. This is one car whose bite matches the loud bark. A 4.5 - 5.5 sec 0-60 MS doesn't stand a chance.
Yes - they are quick, but …
A friend of mine had been bragging about his GT-R for some time and I'd never been in one, so I went up to see him back in July .. in the Roadster.
Sure, his car was mighty quick and made all sorts of interesting noises, but it was ROCK HARD and crashy on bad UK roads, and it became painfully uncomfortable after a few miles. And sure, it can apparently hit 193.6498 mph - but when in its entire life will it ever get anywhere near that?! It’s a bit of a waste of engineering to design something that can achieve that, even though it will likely never do it.
But as an engineering type of person, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before some of the mechanical carnage of repeated power-launches would cause immense and costly problems anytime soon!
( Intriguingly, the set up procedure to get a perfect launch takes twice as long as the actual resulting 0-60 !)
I then took him out in the Roadster, and it was his first time ever in one and tried to "welcome him to the church of EV". He was genuinely shocked at how fast it 'felt'
(well, up to 70/80mph- which is fine by me because it represents the real world of useable speed on public roads), especially for a car needing no road tax, has little servicing costs, and can potentially run for free from sunlight for the next 150,000+ miles.
But he soon reverted to ICE type, and went and blew £20k on some massive upgrades to get, oooh, at least 8 billion horsepower, and even more solid suspension disguised as a 'handling pack' . . . and 3 weeks later he stacked it into a wall because he forgot to upgrade the brakes. He's ok, but Nissan UK aren't too happy with him. His insurance company played hardball too, although its all been bolted back together now.
Another factoid he mentioned was that he rarely gets more than 230/240 miles out of it, due to an average of 15mpg, costing him an amazing £105 ( $170) to fill up. If he does 15,000 miles a year in it, that’s £6,500 / $10,000 a year in fuel alone !! He only puts 98 ron fuel in it which is hard to find.
He admitted that HE's the one with range anxiety !!!!!
