2.5 S 2.5l Cd Front Wheel Drive Tires - Front All-season Tires - Rear All-season on 2040-cars

Auto blog

2013 Nissan GT-R and 2013 Alpina B6 mix it up on track and street

Here we have Autocar making an unforeseen comparison: the Nissan GT-R against the Alpina B6 at Brands Hatch and on public roads. Steve Sutcliffe clobbers the circuit in the 3,828-pound, all-wheel-drive sports car, then sees how well the 4,114-pound, rear-wheel drive grand tourer does against it.
Sutcliffe says there are quite a few similarities between the two cars, but that's really only on the spec sheet. The Nissan's got two turbos attached to its 3.8-liter V6, 542 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque. The Alpina's got two turbos attached to its 4.4-liter V8, 532 hp and 528 lb-ft. But one's brief is to be a monster on the track, the other on the boulevard, and if there's anything the video demonstrates, it's each car's focus.

These 'blind' automotive world record stunts have to stop

Drivers setting world records "blind" – wearing a blindfold or with something obscuring the windshield – is the new thing for some reason. First it was an Alfa Romeo Giulia setting a blind lap at Silverstone with help from a spotter trailing behind, and now this: a stunt man doing a J-turn within a narrow path with nothing but a Nissan Juke's cameras guiding him. He matched the "sighted" J-turn record, flipping the car around in a space about 7 inches longer than the car. I have two issues with these stunts. First, there are just too many world records. Yeah, I said it. Are these meaningful? Is someone else likely to ever attempt this feat? No, because it's just marketing, both for the manufacturer and whoever's still trying to sell those annual books. Stuff like the fastest production car is fine with me. Heck, I'll even take unofficial Nurburgring times – the kind where the drivers can actually see. Second, I'm all for stunts, but do something cool! And preferably something that could only be performed with that particular car, if you're going to make an ad out of it. Yes, the Juke has an Around View Monitor system, which stitches together feeds from four cameras to make it look like the car is being filmed by a drone hovering overhead. I happen to love 360-degree cameras – they let you see things that are just not visible from the driver's seat and make parking and low-speed maneuvering really easy. But the Juke isn't the first car to offer one, and the feature isn't even new to the car. Nissan was at least forthright enough to admit that this professional driver (on a closed course!) had a bunch of practice. But this really says more about his precision driving skills than about the car, or the camera. And just so we're clear, you really shouldn't try to park a car without looking out the windows, even if you have fancy cameras. So what's next? Pretty soon there will be a record for blindest blind stunt. Let me know when someone actually does something interesting. Related Video:

Nissan settles with FTC over misleading dune buggy ad [w/videos]

A couple years ago, Nissan created a series of commercials for its compact Frontier pickup showing the truck performing outlandish stunts such as snowboarding, saving a passenger airplane from a crash landing and climbing a steep sand dune to help a stranded dune buggy. As crazy as the first two commercials were, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took issue with the latter, titled Hill Climb, with the agency considering it to be a misleading commercial since both vehicles required a cable to reach the top of the steep dune.
As such, Ad Age is reporting that Nissan - and its ad agency TBWA Worldwide - has settled with the FTC over the ad despite the fact that it features a disclaimer stating: "Fictionalization. Do not attempt." Nissan did not have to pay out any money in the settlement, but it is prohibited "from using potentially misleading demonstrations in future advertisements for pickups." In addition to the offending commercial, posted below, we've included some of the other related videos from the same Frontier campaign.