Jump to content
SAU Community

Recommended Posts

Just finished reading a review of the R35 in Fridays Herald Sun. Is this the most scathing review on the car ever.

He really goes to town on the car, his biggest critism is the weight, too much technology and that the car has no soul.

He gives it credit for being fast, but simply not very involving to drive.

Owners views????

http://carsguide.news.com.au/site/news-and...t_r_test_drive/

Link to comment
https://www.sau.com.au/forums/topic/269008-r35-gtr-review-in-herald-sun/
Share on other sites

  • Replies 65
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Just finished reading a review of the R35 in Fridays Herald Sun. Is this the most scathing review on the car ever.

He really goes to town on the car, his biggest critism is the weight, too much technology and that the car has no soul.

He gives it credit for being fast, but simply not very involving to drive.

Owners views????

Its the Herald Sun. What do you expect? Good journalism?

Just finished reading a review of the R35 in Fridays Herald Sun. Is this the most scathing review on the car ever.

He really goes to town on the car, his biggest critism is the weight, too much technology and that the car has no soul.

He gives it credit for being fast, but simply not very involving to drive.

Owners views????

well my view is that is rubbish. sure it may not be 'involving' to drive at legal speeds on a public road, as you just put around with no fuss. there is no tricky gearshift, no heavy hard to use steering, no skittish handling. just no fuss motoring. I can't say the weight is any issue for street use. and I can't say it has too much technology.

on a track however and with the driver aids switched OFF it's very involving and challenging to drive anywhere near it's limit. there is plenty of power oversteer to be had if you get on the gas to hard and too early. and it's plenty fun to slide around a bit. it's brutally fast too.

if you want 'involving' to drive. buy a 1983 alfa GTV6. they have no power steering and feel like you need arnie size arms to steer it at low speed. they have an 'interesting' gear shift due to the rear mounted transaxle and long shift linkages. they get a nice tank slapping pendulum effect happening if you can't deal with the oversteer (due to the weight in the rear). they have a great sounding V6 engine, and use far more fuel (and oil) than they should. but they are fun and rewarding to drive on the limit. having said that they are a rubbish car, and on a race track would get spanked by a mild S13 silvia. but you could not say they aren't 'involving'. so if involving is at the top of his list he should be test driving 70s and 80s sports cars instead. if you want a fast, well built, well apointed, fun AND easy to drive powerhouse. then the 35 GTR is a good choice.

Here is an article about it;

http://carsguide.news.com.au/site/news-and...t_r_test_drive/

i think its similar to the one in the newspaper?

The douche c**t whinges more then a bitch with PMS.

Don't like it then F**k off.

Now of course this is a personal opinion but to me there are very few Aussie journos worth listening to.

Dean Evans, Michael Stahl and Peter Robinson spring to mind.

Maybe all these GT-R hating journos should drive it in the wet, apparently its quite an animal.

The douche c**t whinges more then a bitch with PMS.

Don't like it then F**k off.

Take it easy tiger, it's just one mans opinion :D

I haven't driven an R35 so I can't comment, but I can relate to what he is saying in some respects. I know it's a completely different beast, but I used to drive an Audi A4 Quattro Turbo a few years back. It was a beautiful car, went well enough, handled pretty decently, was super refined but I didn't enjoy it. It was too good for it's own good, and took the fun out of driving for me. I drive a Clubsport now, and it may not be anywhere near as polished, but it's pretty good fun and has a lot of character to it. This may not be the same thing in your eyes, but just food for thought.

But hey, I'd love an R35 GT-R parked in my driveway ;)

I can sort of see where the author is coming from. I wouldnt buy an R35 as my daily driver, it is totally wasted on the street. And yes it's "boring" in that context - only because it is 110% competent. It's kind of like chatting to the most competent lawyer in the world.. great at what they do, but they dont do smalltalk with mere mortals too well...

Having said that, the article completely brushes over what this car is about (which has NOTHING to do with getting jollies running around town, picking up your latte and such). He just doesnt understand what this car is primarily about. However the fact you CAN drive around town in relative silence and comfort is a spectacular achievement, given the capabilities of this car.

I think the anticipation and momentum the 35 has generated makes people think it is the "be all and end all".

As such they think it's going to be a hoot to drive in ANY situation.

I agree there are cars (a fraction of a price) which are more engaging and fun on the street, but that's just not the point nor focus of this car. I love the fact that Nissan put a bullseye on the 911T and basically went after it, throwing a lot of time any money, and achieved their goal, whilst asking only half the price. That's what this car is, and stuff the street experience, that's for pussies anyway.

Edited by LSX-438

It is very easy to drive around town and it's not exactly exciting at "legal" road speeds. He should have found himself a nice curvey open road and put his foot to the floor, then he would have realised that Nissan have built the next generation monster that any fool can drive fast. I use my R32 as a daily driver and it's a pain in the butt in traffic. You get the R32 on the same curvey open road and it's a serious handful, constantly stepping the rear out and the aged ATTESA traction control system still frightens the crap out of me and I've been driving it for 8 years.

The R35 is an extremely capable car designed to go stupid speeds and it does it well. It's near impossible to make a car that handles slow speeds well, is reasonably comfortable and very much at home on a race track. Nissan have acheived this.

He's comparison the the Merc is just stupid considering he hates the technology and refers to it being soul less. I test drove a number of Mercs before picking up my R35 and they aren't drivers cars. There seems to be "gap" between you and the car (the technology) and they provide absolutly no feedback. I think Nissan have done a brilliant job is this department as the R35 provides more feedback than any car I've ever driven with this sort of technology.

His problably knocked up his review on his 386DX2/66 running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 because he likes the experience it gives him and he knows where everything is.

He should go and write for House and Garden, I think he'd be more at home.

Less than half the article was about his driving impressions, more than half of it was anecdotes and analogies. That doesn't make a good article in my opinion. If he spent more time describing the driving aspect of the car and what he didn't like based on that instead of saying it's limits are far higher than you could ever reach on a public road it would have been a better read.

This Author has no clue, he got his jollies off by driving his freaking ute around a corner 'a little' sideways and thought that was more fun than the R35 cause the R35 didn't feel like fun driving below the speed limit. He wants to drive a sports car that feels fun to drive at slow speeds. I'm sorry they gave the R35 review to the wrong guy. Sure the R35 doesn't have a Ferrari engine growling behind you and has alot of cool technology. That doesn't make it soulless. The car is built to go stupidly fast and wow is it exciting when you do drive it at that level. It feels exciting knowing that you put the foot down you just go into warp speed. I can only imagine how much fun this car must be on the track. After doing a few very fast corners and dropping the hammer in safe wide open roads and corners its alot of fun near even remotely near its limits.

For the performance and beautiful build quality & amazing style of this car for the price it is. There is NO comparision to ANY OTHER CAR! As Top Gear said "They built a new yard stick".

The R35 is a supercar at a huge discount. Even for us Aussies who pay through the butt for the car compared to everyone else its still great value.

Wow... the carsguide is still as rubbish as I remember.

I read less than a 1/4 of the article and felt like i was reading an article by a very old man (who is unaware of things such as the internet and iphones) telling me what is wrong with society these days. What a sad sad man.

I think I will go by J Clarkson's review of the new GTR "They have created a new yard stick".

Good work Paul, at least in the current economy the chance of you being on the unemployment line is much higher.... sooner the better! Now off to read a nice book with a cup of tea and leave testing performance cars to people who appreciate 'technology'... i would suggest you Google it but that would not work for you... off you go and look it up in your dictionary.

I can sort of see where the author is coming from. I wouldnt buy an R35 as my daily driver, it is totally wasted on the street. And yes it's "boring" in that context - only because it is 110% competent.

What a ridiculous statement... So for you to drive a car as a daily you want it to be inferior...?

By your logic a Veyron would be the most dull, mind-numbing experience possible as it is incredibly competent with an ability to accelerate that is almost unmatched in a road car...

The philosophy behind the new GTR is the 'anyone, anywhere, anytime supercar'.... I would definitely use it as a daily.

Edited by r32line

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



  • Similar Content

  • Latest Posts

    • Bit of an update to this one. Having some issues on the dyno that held us back (boost spiking) and I want to pass some info over you guys and see what you think is wrong with my setup. The current readout on this dyno is 462rwkw on a low reading dyno so keep in mind it is a real world 500rwkw setup on a hub dyno. Don't read into the power figure too much as a sign of the issue. The short and curly of it is: 2.8 Litre Racepace build RB25 NEO N/A Head with VCT (internally standard however ) Borgwarner EFR 8474  Turbosmart 50mm Straight Gate + Mac valve 6Boost Manifold 4" dump to full 4" exhaust (nil restrictions) Wastegate plumbed back in and all angles in the exhaust system are acceptable and not too sharp. GFB SV52 BOV in cooler piping  Turbosmart BOV in EFR Housing   The issue we are having is it comes onto full boost for example at 4000rpm and spikes to 24/25psi, before dropping down to 17psi before slowly rising back up to the target boost of 23psi. It was extremely uncontrollable and the tuner actually had to ramp in boost progrssively with each 1000rpm on each boost setting we selected to try and reduce the amount of spiking. Sometimes we would see a drop of 10psi from the peak at the beginning of the run, to the low, until it took the next 500-1000rpm to stabilise back up to the target boost. The tuner is pretty confident that the straight gate is just a poorly designed product and leaks too much boost upon cracking the gate open and theres no way to fix it other than going to a poppet valve. He's also confient theres no ignition breakdown or floating valves. The fueling is extremely stable as well. Turbo speed is somewhere around the 109,000rpm area. The spanner in the works for me is that prior to this Borgwarner and StraightGate, the car was tuned on -5 twins at a diferent tuner, and he also had issues controlling the boost with it spiking around the same rpm range, so to me this sounds like the same issue and it can't be anything on the turbo side as this was all changed and I think the behaviour is extremely similar, if not the same. We also removed the mac valve and did a run on wastegate pressure and it still spiked and had the same behaviour. My thoughts on possibilities are: Boost Leak VCT Cam Gear isn't reliably activating consistently - (On this however, we did a run with the VCT disabled and the boost still spiked) Turbosmart BOV is not handling the boost? However this seems unlikely to not be able to handle 20psi. I have a couple of logs that I can't make sense of if anybody knows how to read them and can obtain further logs of other parameters if they are not enough, happy to pay for anyones time. The dyno readout with the power figure is the most recent last week. The other picture is from two weeks prior to that where we couldn't break 400kw (we removed the cat), however the issue of the boost control persisted. @Lithium @Piggaz @burn4005 @GTSBoy @discopotato03 I've tagged those that were quite active in recent pages here, no disrespect to those that know turbos well but I missed tagging. Cheers 
    • I recently purchased a 2018 Infiniti Q60, which has an SD card navigation map. I can see my system has options for real time traffic updates etc, and am wondering if there is something I can purchase to get this working? I can see there are at least updated maps for USA and Canada, but nothing for Australia. Surely Infiniti took changing road systems and city expansions into account when they decided to use an inbuilt navigation over Android Auto/Apple Car Play, or are we doomed to drive on streets that don't exist in the navigation system if you drive to a new area?
    • Luckily I didn't put in etch primer as I just found out it's not compatible with my body filler lol. Also just need to sand the panel anywhere between 150-400 grit so I'm in the clear there. It does say to not apply to soft old paint, I assume that means paint that is flaking, peeling,etc
    • @dbm7 and @GTSBoy thank you both very much! will give that a shot!
×
×
  • Create New...