Following the debut of the new 2017 GT-R at the New York Auto Show designer X-Tomi decided to play around with the car and show us what it would like as a drop-top. The Nissan GT-R Cabrio he’s come up with looks rather good… on paper. Such a thing could never exist in the real world.
Well, it could exist if you take a GT-R and chop its roof off. But as a production car Nissan GT-R Cabrio makes less sense than a super car with a winch on the front. There’s all sorts of technical difficulties that make this thing an impossibility, and that’s before realizing there isn’t a market for it, anyway.
If you study the typical Nissan GT-R buyers, you will find that they are predominantly car geeks with obsessive interest in things like gear shift ferocity, minute levels of damping, the difference between nitrogen and regular air for use in the tires, and other such mind-numbingly boring technical details. The hardtop GT-R suits these guys really well. But a convertible would be an affront to every value they hold dear.
A Nissan GT-R Cabrio would require a great deal of developmental effort to make sure it works as a normal car, let alone something as technically brilliant as the GT-R. And it can never be just as good, because it will inevitably be heavier, less precise, and overall less together. But hey, this image looks cool, so let’s just enjoy it!
Rendering by X-Tomi Design