Nissan revived its killed-off GT-R badge as a Porsche-baiting halo car

The GT-R badge had died twice: the original 1970s coupé was killed off by the 1973 oil crisis, and the 1989 R32 Skyline GT-R — the car Australia's Wheels magazine christened 'Godzilla on wheels' — ran until 2002. When Carlos Ghosn took over a bankrupt Nissan in 1999 and drew up his Revival Plan, he decided the struggling brand needed a halo car to rebuild enthusiasm: the GT-R reborn to challenge Porsche, Lamborghini and Ferrari at a comparatively affordable price, keeping its four round taillights.

Chief engineer Kazutoshi Mizuno, the R34's engineer known as Mr. GT-R, initially rejected the assignment: the brief put the car on Nissan's dated FM platform, and he said he 'could not make a world-class performance car from this platform as Ghosn requested'. He was eventually granted full development authority, built his own Premium Midship architecture, and spent over six years and more than 2,000 wind-tunnel runs perfecting the twin-turbo V6 coupe, benchmarked on the Nürburgring against a Porsche 911 Turbo — with Ghosn himself driving laps against the Porsche during testing.

The R35 GT-R launched in Japan in December 2007 and reached the US as a 2009 model at $70,475 — a price that made its 3.2-second blasts to 60 mph and near-record Nürburgring laps (7:38.54 in damp conditions during development) look like the bargain of the century. Car and Driver compared it directly against the BMW M3 and 911 Turbo and the world re-learned Nissan's name.

Nissan kept the formula: constant incremental upgrades on a single generation, no wholesale redesign. The run lasted 18 years and roughly 48,000 units — far longer than any previous GT-R generation — before the final Midnight Purple T-Spec rolled off the line in August 2025.

The R35 ran 18 years and about 48,000 units, launched in the US at $70,475 against a Porsche 911 Turbo costing multiples more, with 7:38.54 Nürburgring laps in testing

A brand emerging from near-death needed proof of engineering capability, and a flagship sports car communicates that faster than any advertising.

Ghosn gave the project both priority and a constraint — affordable supercar performance — and then granted Mizuno the development autonomy to make it real.

Benchmarking only the Porsche 911 Turbo gave the programme a single ruthless target rather than a spec sheet of compromises.

Keeping one generation alive with continual upgrades turned a car into a platform for myth: every lap record and track test compounded the last.

A halo car works when engineering truth backs the myth: Nissan let its best engineer refuse the brief until he got a dedicated platform, then funded an uncompromised flagship.

The R35 outlived the executive who commissioned it and became the last of its kind — a hand-finished, continuously refined halo car selling a few hundred a year in its final seasons as regulations killed it off market by market: Australia and Europe in 2021, North America in 2024, and the last car, a Midnight Purple T-Spec with 565 hp, built in August 2025. Its alumni run Nissan's Nismo performance arm and its DNA seeded the firm's sports line-up, a two-decade dividend from one decision to fund an engineer's stubbornness.