There’s been plenty of speculation that the next Nissan GT-R will be a hybrid, and now the carmaker’s chief creative officer is confirming this.
In an interview at the U.K. launch of the Infiniti Q70, Nissan’s Shiro Nakamura told Top Gear that, yes, the new GT-R will be a hybrid.
He went on to say that the car will be a “front-engined 2+2 seater coupe,” meaning it will retain the current GT-R’s layout.
Nissan’s Vision Gran Turismo concept features a lot of GT-R-esque design cues, but Nakamura said that because that car is mid-engined, it doesn’t really preview the GT-R. Some elements of the front and rear fascias may make it into the design, though.
Ditto Nissan’s upcoming Le Mans racer, which will have GT-R badging, but probably won’t be tied to the road car in any significant way.
While the current GT-R has been on sale since 2008, Nakamura said the new model won’t arrive until 2018 at the earliest.
He said the current car is still selling well. Nissan updates it every year to keep things fresh, and last year added a more-extreme NISMO model to the lineup that generated plenty of excitement.
There’s more performance to be squeezed out of the current GT-R, Nakamura said. Not that it needs to.
The current GT-R is still worthy of its Godzilla nickname, so who knows what Nissan has planned for the next couple of years, or what kind of monster the new GT-R hybrid will be.
