The issue of the R35 GT-R’s true power has been a contentious one ever since the first press car strapped onto a dyno recorded a much higher than expected result.
Many have claimed that cars given to journalists were deliberately altered by Nissan to produce a higher power number than that stated on the official spec sheet (353kW/473hp), and that customer cars would enjoy no such increase. Well, the folks at Car and Driver have decided to put these rumours to rest and have conducted their own independent test of several R35 GT-R’s - with interesting results.
After testing a full customer-spec GT-R as well as another late-production R35, C&D come to the conclusion that Nissan is definitely understating the car’s power figure and that cars destined for delivery to paying customers should possess the same number of horses under the bonnet as the cars they used for their experiment. How many horses? Think around 520hp (389kW) at the flywheel, which is just 10hp/6kW shy of the advertised output of a Porsche 997 911 GT2. There’s still some question marks over C&D’s assumption of a 20% drivetrain loss, so don’t take their results as gospel. For a truly definitive answer, someone’s going to need to rip the VR38DETT out of their R35 and put it on a bona fide engine dyno - a far more involved exercise, but one that yields far more accurate results. Until that happens though, we’ll have to satisfy ourselves with C&D’s numbers. Head over to Car and Driver and check out their full article on the GT-R’s dyno test here. [Car and Driver]
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This is totaly un-true and spreading lies. please dont spread them further.
i have made a small write up here:
http://cba-r35.blogspot.com/2008/08/car-and-driver-print-blasphemous-fud.html
but over all…
the fact of the matter is nissan is not under rating anything. a dyno is not a tool able to find exact engine horse power. especially not when your guessing friction losses and also to many other variables.
not only to mention nissan states 10% drivetrain loss, not 20% like c&D guessed… not even a lambo has 20% loss, and when the R35 has so much more technology than the lambo too.
a dyno is a tool to find out how much horsepower certain parts gave you (or to diag problems and tune ecu's etc).
one thing this article does is spread miss information and lies and it shouldnt be doing that just for web traffic. car and driver does a huge publication fail.
Yeah, there are a few inconsistencies with Car and Driver’s approach, and their article is by no means perfect. That’s why I was sure to caution people against treating their results as being the final word on GT-R horsepower output, and made special mention of the drivetrain loss figure.
Everyone needs to understand that using a chassis dyno to establish a flywheel horsepower figure is never going to produce an accurate result. It’s an excellent means of ascertaining just how much power is actually being put into the ground (where it counts), but its a flawed method for comparing manufacturer figures.
Is Car and Driver lying? Are Nissan lying? It’s not important, for it’s already established that the R35 GT-R is a hugely fast machine, regardless of whether it’s a press fleet car, or one delivered to a customer.