2022 Nissan GT-R T-Spec review Blog: Is this the best GT-R to date?

G'day i'm Syed Faizan 

    

             

                                                             I 'm Constently bringing you reviews of utes and SUVs 

but today i thought we'd do something a little bit different this is the Nissan gtr and from the end of 2021 it's no longer allowed to be sold in Australia because it doesn't meet side impact safety rules fun police getting involved in everything that we do this here is the t spec which kind of bridges the gap between the standard gtr and the ball tearing nismo version it's priced at just over 9.8 M PKR  but if that's too expensive the whole range kicks off at a little under 800 grand but i don't know that you will pay that second hand i flick through a used car listing for gtr these are selling for around a million dollars well they're listed for a million dollars i have seen them change hands for about 850 grand so there is a huge amount of demand for these at the moment this competes with things like the porsche 911 the audi r8 and the BMW M8 competition there's a few other sort of random competitors in there but they're the sort of main ones that it's competing against today we're going to do a detailed review of this car if you do want to skip ahead to other parts of the Blog you can use the time codes up on the screen there or if you're on Blogger.com then scroll down and use the chapters 

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 that's going to tell you every single time we drive cars affected by the fun police let's talk exterior design so you've got four external colors to pick from they're all 1500 bucks this is kind of a personal favorite of mine it has a lot of heritage within this and it's called millennium jade and it absolutely pops here on the gtr i think it just looks absolutely schmidt now this car's been out for ages and despite the fact it's been out for ages i think it still looks nice and aggressive i had the chance to drive the nismo version of this at the launch in germany and i think that takes it up to another level with all these bits cut out of it and stuff like that but I'll run you through the t-spec changes in just a second but it does sort of bridge that gap between the regular one and the nismo so down the front here you have a big open grille as i get rid of these flies where the cooling comes through you've got a twin turbo v6 petrol engine in there and it needs a lot of cooling especially given this car will do over 300 ks an hour so it is some pretty serious equipment now up the front here instead of a nissan badge you've got a gtr badge and just next to it t-spec so that'll signify this is different to a standard gtr and then down from that body color you've got this uh sort of brushed aluminium style design bit of piano black and then another gaping air hole down the bottom here so pretty awesome looking setup and and this car is very aggressive especially when it's coming towards you can definitely tell it's a gtr the design is synonymous with gtr over here on the headlights you have a set of led headlights indicator built into that top section there and if you have a look at the bonnet here you have functional cooling vents along the top there too and then headlight washers as well now around the side here we have a set of 20 inch forged alloy wheels so t-spec gets this gold design i reckon that looks seriously cool really just suits this millennium jade colour as well this particular speck also gets the dunlop sp sport max tyres so this is effectively a semi-slick so you want to be driving in very dry conditions when you're going out for a fang behind here you've got a set of giant brembo carbon ceramic brakes these are from the nismo so they measure 410 millimeters at the front 390 at the rear six piston caliper again at the nismo launch that i was able to attend in germany i had a chance to hold this and it is incredibly light when you think of a rotor that side you think it's going to be really heavy but it's light to hold and you can see that when you reduce unsprung mass on each corner of the car that's going to increase the pace you can do and also improve the handling as well so really cool setup and i'll be keen to see how they perform when we go out for a bit of a drive now up  to the top here                                                                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                     you've got another GTR badge and then there's also a vent built into this little section just here to direct air out of it you don't have an indicator built into that wing mirror i thought i'd show you this um so this is kind of the og of this type of door handle right they use this on tesla cars now as well basically push in here and then pull back door handle to open the car so really nice setup and you've got a button there to lock and unlock the car with a proximity key come around the back now t-speak also gets this carbon wing and i love that it's exposed carbon as well so everyone that you're driving past can tell that it is a carbon wing and of course look at the rear this is kind of just synonymous gtr design with those tail lights wedged into there another gtr badge t-spec there as well now i wanted to tell you a quick story about the exhaust as these flies infest my face it is a titanium exhaust and they have used titanium exhaust before on these but um when i was at the the nismo launch in germany i had an interesting chat with tamura-san who effectively said people didn't know it was a titanium exhaust until it heated up and went that blue color so what they did is for the tips they actually made them permanently that color so that you could actually tell it was a titanium exhaust and you didn't have to wait for the car to get warm so it is funny how the functionality of a titanium exhaust being lighter is overridden by style when it comes to everyone needing to know that your exhaust is actually titanium tell me what you think about the design is it too old now do you think it still looks good despite its age let me know what you reckon about the nissan gtr down there so we are inside the gtr let's start off with the key so it looks pretty familiar you've got gtr up the top there lock unlock and boot and then on the back of the key it's blank it's a proximity sensing key so you just push that little button on the door once you're inside you have a start stop button down here so let's talk about the styling so yes this does feel quite dated because this car is old but if i'm honest i actually think it still looks pretty cool they've really i guess classed up the interior they haven't gone to town on digital screens and all the sort of stuff that you'll find in a lot of cars today like you think audi r8 for example you've got that big backlit display it's it's all very high tech and fancy whereas this just sticks to what it does best which is being a performance car it gives you analog gauges ahead of the driver this stuff here which we'll go through when we go for a drive but it is just straight to the point then what they've done here especially with the t-spec you can see there's alcantara along the dashboard the a-pillar along the roof there as well with that stitching really nice set up and then the t-spec as well gets these green leather inserts along the doors uh this center console and um i just think it looks i just think it looks cool so um yeah that's my opinion on this it is old but good old now in terms of the touch points so soft there and soft there which is kind of typical nissan how soft is it well we've got our durometer we've tested the main surfaces in this cabin if you want to see how this car compares to others have a look at the link in the description builds quality so this is all really really sturdy uh I've found in the past with some of these cars especially the older ones that I've driven they've actually held together really well despite their age so that is good doors see what that sounds like sounds nice and solid and it's cool that the door handle is just this little thing here that you pull up so yeah not a bad setup in the gtr now let's talk infotainment so this is a pretty basic infotainment system it's an eight-inch display you have shortcut buttons either side you also have this little toggle down here to switch between menus on the move just to make life a little bit easier but inherent to all of this you have inbuilt satellite navigation so it's just a pretty sort of basic and straightforward setup you don't have any smartphone mirroring so no apple carplay or android auto is available and then in terms of audio you have an am and FM radio and that's all plumbed through an 11 speaker bose branded sound system pretty good sound system so if you do like your beats you can turn it up if you're sick of listening to the exhaust probably the most exciting thing about this is the function menu this is where you'll see all of your driving  information such as your engine temperatures the torque split for the all-wheel drive system and then you can flick through the menus to get g bubbles uh boost it really is just uh how do i say this it really is just like a an old-school implementation of the gauges that you used to see strapped to cars growing up so i love that it has all this stuff it is ultimately pretty pointless if you're just driving around uh just in a stock car but i think it's good that it has it it just adds a bit of um just adds a bit of customness to this gtr now let's chat safety this is going to be a very short discussion uh this has like barely any safety technology attached to it you've got your standard airbag the front side and curtain airbags but you have no aeb no lane departure warning no blind spot monitoring none of that stuff so it is pretty basic in that sense and i guess it's it's just a symptom of having to spend lots of money to integrate that technology and it kind of not being necessary in a car like this brands like porsche and audi have moved to integrating these systems into their cars because you know they're constantly evolving so let's hope the next generation of this comes with all of that safety tech but in terms of parking you have front and rear parking sensors and a reverse view camera i'll show you what the camera looks like it's really not very good it is super low resolution but you do get those guidelines to give you an idea of what's behind you and which direction the car is heading in so let's talk about practicality and we'll start with your connectivity so you have one 12 volt outlet hidden just here next to the steering wheel in the center console here you have another 12 volt outlet and then two USB ports and an auxiliary port then in terms of storing your phone it can live here in the cup holders without too many dramas and what about your coffee cup well here it is you've got two tiers of cup holder here so you can pop it in that one which means coffee is easy to extract then you have a slightly deeper one as well of course with our bottle that means the deeper one easily fits into there without any drums there are no teeth though so that might move around a little bit there also isn't really a great deal of storage inside the doors you can fit a small bottle like that but it's not really sort of built to hold too much in terms of other storage you have center console here that you can easily pop a few little bits and pieces in and then you have a glove box as well  although there isn't a great deal of room there but i do love the fact that you get this leather clad gtr book for your manual and there's also a switch over there that disables the boot lid as well so if you do need to leave the car with a valet you can basically switch that off lock this with the key and then you can't get into the boot now in terms of comfort you have dual zone automatic   

                                                    climate control the seats so the seats 

are electrically adjustable for the driver and front passenger you can go forwards backwards you can also move the backrest forwards backwards you can lift the seat as well go up and down with the front portion of it you also have heated seats so there's a little switch down there to activate that seats themselves have got that green finish on them alcantara in the center there and then they're perforated on the outer edges these hug you in really nicely you've got these little sleeves in here for you know four point harness as well if you ever want to cut down that path inside your car it has all of that functionality the steering wheel offers both tilt and reach adjustment but it's kind of unique you've got two little switches here one for your tilt and you'll notice the cluster moves with it as well and then you have another switch there for your reach which is pretty cool and then in terms of our reach test all of this stuff is easy to reach while you're driving now this is normally the bit where i would get in the back and show you how much leg in headroom there is and stuff but that's probably not going to happen so this is a bit like the 911 in the sense that you've got two seats there to make this a four seater technically but you're probably not going to use them they're kind of emergency use only but it is good space to store little bits and pieces if you do need to there isn't a great deal of leg room here if you do have this seat quite far back but you do get a couple of creature comforts so you've got a cup holder just there in the center you've got hooks on the sides there to hold like a jacket or something like that i suffix points on the two seats plus a big subwoofer for the sound system so let's talk about cargo space I don't expect it to be big but let's see what it looks like anyway look that's actually not terrible it has a really high boot lip but 315-ish liters of cargo space i don't have our suitcase but we've got this camera bag it's sort of more than enough to fit something that size in there which i think is is pretty reasonable in fact i Faizan you could even fit a set of Cricket kit in there i'm not a Cricketer but um yeah i think this is the type of car that you want to be able to take to the cricket club and you know whip your clubs out go for a hit whatever golfers do um i like this as well there's like a leather pull here to bring the boot down as well so instead of having to grab this you can just pull that down and the way it goes so yeah not a bad setup there now normally what i would do is we'd be driving as we got to this section but I wanted you to hear this have a listen to this everything sounds so mechanical with this car and the reason for that is that the engine is up the front here but the transmission is down the back it has a rear transaxle and basically sits back there there's a shaft that runs down to the trans axle and then another one that runs out of the transaxle over to the front axle because this is permanent all-wheel drive and that's all done via a clutch so i'll explain how that works in a second but you hear a lot of mechanical stuff here and as i shift this into drive you can just hear everything happening there as the car is ready to take off so it is really cool and that's probably one of the things i love about this it's not quite it's not sort of technical in that sense it is very mechanical and it feels incredibly raw so let's hit the road and we'll start talking about the engine all right so we are now moving let's talk about the engine so you've got a 3.8 liter twin turbo charged v6 petrol engine it makes 419 kilowatts of power and 632 newton meters of torque it is just such a good amount there especially in a vehicle like this look it does weigh a little bit so it's about 1700 kilos but it's more than enough to get it up and moving and you will definitely feel it once you're on the move and it's all mated to a six-speed dual clutch transmission back when this was launched this was one of the first cars or the first sports cars on the market that actually had a dual clutch transmission they were kind of the og of the dual clutch and in that sense it feels a little bit old-school so it's not quite as spelt as something like a 911 but when you do sort of start rifling through the gears it can actually increase the pace of gear shifts using these switches down here that i'll run you through in a second how does it all feel behind the wheel just in your standard driving mode well it's actually pretty civil so when you are in and around the city it's sort of doing everything that it needs to do with the ride it is pretty firm when it's in its standard mode but you can slot it down into comfort and when it's in comfort it's actually surprisingly good it has adaptive damping and that means that when it is in that comfort mode everything is much softer it does have more body roll if you do get stuck into it but it does mean that potholes speed humps and all the kind of stuff that you'll spot in and around the city are dealt with much easier than they would be if this was just a straight sort of fixed suspension setup so I briefly touched on the engine and the transmission at the back there you have a one and a half way limited slip differential that means that when you do have throttle load it's acting as a limited slip differential but then when you're off throttle load it's half acting as a limited slip differential so one way lsd is only on throttle load and then a two way lsd is on and off throttle load that it's acting as an lsd and that means that when you are sort of doing turns and you're not on the throttle it's still giving you some of that limited slip but it's not fully locked like it can be on a drift car for example it generally uses a two-way lsd but up the front there it's an open differential so when it does pulse talk to the front axle and it can do up to 50 talk to the front axle 100 of torque to the rear axle it means that you are getting an open diff and then if it does need a restrict wheel sleeper does that using the brakes and a sort of torque vectoring system now let's talk fuel economy nissan claims a average fuel economy of 11.7 liters per 100k the reason i'm not going to show you the fuel economy here is this particular car was trucked to the proving ground so its entire life with us has been driving around the proving grounds so it's done no highway driving no sort of city driving in that sense in a real city so um we won't bother looking at that but you know this is a performance car you would expect it to sit around the 12 or 13 liter per 100 mark if you are driving it as a daily so what's it like in terms of noise we'll dial up the speed just a little bit here too country driving speeds look there is a fair bit of tire noise coming into the cabin with those semi-slicks it is you know transmitting pretty much everything into here especially on coarse ship roads so if you are using this as a daily it is worth just keeping in mind that it's not going to be the quietest place to be seated in the world but ultimately if you have the stereo turned up it's not that bad you do also have a switch down here to limit exhaust noise so give that one little flick and all of a sudden out of the back it goes nice and quiet so you can either go loud or quiet depending on what boot you're in let's quickly talk about these switches down here as well so you have suspension mode comfort normal and r you also have drivetrain mode in r or normal and finally you have stability control in standard uh or off to access the r modes you just push and hold the switches until r lights up and speaking of which we're going to go for a little step here so i'm going to pop this into r4 drivetrain for stability control and then we'll pop it into r4 suspension i'll put this into manual mode which is across here I'm using paddle shifters for everything now dial back a couple of gears here for our corner loving that noise little bit of overrun there oh man this is absolutely epic  i genuinely lost for words this is insane machine okay so a bit of a backstory when I went to the uh nismo launch in Germany we went straight on to an autobahn and was sitting on 300ks an hour straight out of basically the hotel to the track and then we drove the cars on the track this car has been engineered over the years to become this incredibly capable track missile and while something like a 911 is a point-and-shoot a lightweight machine this just feels next level in terms of the the punch you get in the back as you lay on the throttle you've got that induction noise coming out of the engine and it has so much traction mid corner just roll onto the throttle here far out it is an absolute missile even in the r mode here for the suspension it's not overly firm it's not like it's back jarring or sort of doing your head in as it's driving it really is just nice and sensible and relaxing steering feels good it could be a little heavier i think it is sort of fairly light but it does feel just exciting behind the wheel that all-wheel drive system I think that if you were to lose traction in this you would have to be doing some serious speed even the gearbox it is so nice and fast that when you go to pick up the throttle oh it is seriously cool stuff despite the age of this car it still puts a massive smile on my face let's talk about these breaks so obviously if you're capable of doing like 300 k's an hour you want to have decent stoppers before they're warm they're not great but as you pile it into a corner and you're sort of attacking that pedal on the way in sorry i can't help myself yeah when you're attacking the pedal on the way in it has a lot of pedal feel and as you sort of start getting gradually harder onto that pedal it pulls up the car incredibly well and with those semi-slicks because you have so much rubber on the road you have enough grip there to pull this thing up in a real hurry with the carbon ceramic brakes i don't necessarily stop quicker 

than a car with steel brakes but they 

give you repetitive stops so if you are 

attacking a race track you can basically hammer these brakes as hard as you want and generally they won't fade or it'll take them much longer to fade and they also last longer than a standard set of brakes as well so that is one positive to that they are more expensive to replace when they do go but for the most part you're actually getting a much better driving experience because you're able to just constantly hit that pedal and know that it's going to feel the exact same every single time all right let me put this all back into quiet mode and let's talk about what this is like just sort of driving normally visibility wise clear visibility down the front there it is a big car but it doesn't feel all that big behind the wheel it sort of is very sort of easy to drive in that sense visibility out the rear is great the spoiler does sort of eat into that vision line a little bit but it's not too bad visibility out the side is good as well but keep in mind you don't have any of those blind spot monitors or anything like that you actually perhaps sit a little bit higher than i would have liked i would like to be able to sit a little lower in the seat but for the most part it's fine i personally think that for me as an average driver this feels very exciting to drive it's not quite as point and shoot as something like a you know a 911 but it still is incredibly exciting to drive despite the age of the chassis with a professional behind the wheel and I've done hot laps in these as a passenger man it has so much grip it has so much traction and mechanical grip as well that it really just sits on another level in terms of japanese sports cars now let's quickly talk about this thing here in front of me so i love when we'rendriving just being able to have a look at some of these menus seeing our braking forces our acceleration forces seeing where the torque is being distributed whether it's all going to the back or to the front really is just a awesome little menu to have and you don't have time to look at it while you're driving but it is good to have a little bit of a peek down here when things settle down a little bit so i do love that it has that so let's talk zero to 100. nissan claims a time of 2.7 seconds and it's actually a fun process to enable launch control on this car so i'll just come to a stop here what you do is everything goes into R mode but i found that it gets a faster launch in the sense that it tucks down when the suspension is in comfort so that's drive train and stability control in our suspension and comfort all you do is hold the brake and the throttle the revs go up to about 4000 rpm and then I just sidestep the brake and we shoot forward so let's give this a shot and see how we go there's the revs the goal the brake oh man that is like sick inducing you know normally with an ev when you do that you sort of get all the rush and all that sort of fun stuff but in this you hear the noise and it kind of i don't know it just gets faster with an ev you get all of that sudden acceleration and then it tapers off with this it's kind of it hooks up and then once it hooks up it slingshots you forward like just an absolute rocket ship so that will never get old now quickly touch on this as well exhaust sound so as you sort of go back through the gears you do hear you do hear a fair bit of noise coming out of it but a lot of it is just induction noise and then a little bit of squealing there from the brakes you don't really have all the barks and the pops that you get in some other cars with dual clutch transmissions and look i think that's fine i've seen stacks of these cars that have after-market exhausts you stick one of those on this and your whole neighborhood will know that you're driving a gtr so yeah that is worth keeping in mind if you do want all of that raw sound and emotion this is more just about delivering power and torque to the ground as opposed to making a big racket about it     

                                                               so the nissan gt-r look i grew up with

gtrs well i didn't actually own any gtrs but some of my mates did and they were quite an iconic car in my teenage years and this to this day and age to me is such an appealing car like it may be old it might be dated and all that sort of stuff but it puts a huge smile on my face and it just feels like a driver's car a lot of the new cars like the m8 competition are just so fast but not quite as engaging as something like this that just sticks to a sort of pretty easy and traditional formula so yeah look this puts a big smile on my 

face the flies definitely don't but I 

think that if you are wanting to buy a piece of history now is the time to be getting your name down for one of these because later on who knows this will be hybrid or electric or something like that today is the day that this is a twin turbo v6 and it puts a big smile on 

Faizan's face so let me know in the 

comment section below have you bought a t-spec have you got an R35 or even the nismo on order that thing is like next level altogether let me know in the comments section below what do you think about the rules about side impact and    

                                           This being killed off in Pakistan let 

me know what you think down there now if you did enjoy this Blog please make sure you share it with your mates and if you haven't done so already subscribe to our Blog that way you'll find out every time i get attacked by flies but until next time        

take it easy