Uptight, outta sight

I know what you want from me. You think I'm just your little word slut, that I'm here just to arouse you with steamy descriptions of the new and instantly legendary Nissan GT-R. You want me to parade around in frilly verbiage, like: "The acceleration of the twin-turbo, all-wheel-drive, 480-hp GT-R is much like a 50-yard field goal in the NFL, wherein your butt is the football." Sigh. I feel so used.

But I'm not going to do that, see? I'm not going to say that Nissan's appallingly fast, superbly balanced GT-R sports car is a Ferrari killer, though it easily manhandles Maranello's F430 in 0-60 mph performance, quarter-mile time and lateral grip, and for a fraction of the price (an MSRP of around $70,000, though dealers can charge what they want, and will). I refuse to be drawn into comparisons between the Porsche GT2 -- a $200,000 street racer with suspension settings by Torquemada -- and this serene, effortlessly livable, all-weather coupe that, inconveniently for the top-line Porsche, matches it step for step. It matters a little, but not a lot, that the GT-R is within a second or two (7.38 seconds) of the production-car lap record at Germany's fabled Nurburgring. After all, most Americans think the Nurburgring is a lobster dish.

Why? Because, for all its pants-ripping performance, the GT-R is surprisingly -- amazingly -- not all that exciting to drive. Oh yeah, there's epic velocity here, and yet, because there is so much assurance, so many layers of electronic self-preservation, there isn't much frisson or fear. Without fear, there is no fun, which anyone who's had sex in a public place can tell you.

Nissan doesn't even blush. Here's a direct quote from the product briefing: "GT-R offers supercar performance to a broad range of customers for the first time without intimidation."

Despite the GT-R's official nickname, "Godzilla," it's more like 2 tons of fluffy kitten.

Right about now legions of fanboys are throwing down their Sony PlayStation controllers to fire off strongly worded, if badly spelled, e-mails of outrage and dissent. The GT-R's cult status comes courtesy of the video game Gran Turismo, which introduced American audiences to Japan's only true super car. (Previously known as the Skyline GT-R, several generations of the car have appeared over the past 20 years.) In that it started life as an ordinary coupe and was then invested with such insane amounts of raciness (some Skylines had as much as 600 factory horsepower under the hood), the Skyline GT-R had that certain something, that deep perversion of purpose, that Asian import tuners dearly love. It was so wrong it was right.