Ok, we’ll allow you a moment of time to dust off the torches and pitchforks. We may have to get used to a world where the Nissan GT-R badge is reserved for an all-electric sports car one day, but the pairing has come a lot sooner than you may have expected.
Yes, that is an R32 Nissan Skyline GT-R and yes, it’s now running on electric power. Oh, and this is all the work of Nissan itself. We know, we know, we’re slightly eye-twitching about it too.
It’ll be one of the stars of its Tokyo Auto Salon lineup in January, but it turns out this project is far from new. We’ve known it was coming since 2023 with Nissan quietly teasing the build in early 2023, only to go pretty quiet on it since.
Well, other than stealthily showcasing it at this year’s Nismo festival which took place in October – its presence seemingly flew completely over the radar of Western media, ourselves included.
In truth, we don’t know a great deal about the build beyond it swapping the 2.6-litre RB26 straight-six for batteries and (presumably) a pair of electric motors to retain it as an all-wheel drive car. We can only speculate power, although we’d assume something well north of the factory-quoted 276bhp when the R32 was new – even if that was a conservative lie.
For some reference, the dual-motor Nismo Ariya produces 429bhp, and we reckon it’s safe to assume those motors are used here. Expect weight to have risen considerably over its 1.4-tonne original mass, though.
Visual changes are pretty discreet. There’s a new set of wheels and brakes, which we think are sourced from an R35 based on the orange callipers, as well as the deletion of its front fog lights. Nissan has only published one image, but from some boots-on-the-ground pics from the Nismo festival, we’ve seen the exhaust has been removed and seemingly a smoother underbody fitted.
Don’t worry about Nissan going on some all-out assault to turn every remaining R32 into an EV, though. It seems this is simply a one-off rather than a testbed for a production kit, with this example put together by volunteer engineers simply just because.
