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Kaz and Shiro talk Gran Turismo 7 details, Titan Nismo and more in AMA

One of the greatest innovations to come about thanks to the gigantic popularity of Reddit is the Ask Me Anything (AMA) question and answer format. The AMA becomes especially worthwhile, of course, when the person(s) answering the questions have detailed information or insight on products we love.
So, in the case of the recent AMA session with Gran Turismo creator and mastermind Kazunori Yamauchi (above), and his buddy and Nissan chief designer Shiro Nakamura (right), it was basically must-read stuff.
The pair really lived up to our expectations, too, with Kaz offering a lot of useful information about the future of the Gran Turismo franchise (especially the upcoming GT7 for Playstation 4), and Shiro promising to bring some interesting new ideas back to his colleagues at Nissan.

Nissan applies for 'R-Hybrid' trademark, but what is it for?

Patent and trademark filings are sort of like tasseography for those of us in the auto industry. If you know where and how to look at something, there's a lot to be figured out. Take this trademark filing from Nissan - it's similar to the Pure Drive badge found on a Versa or Sentra, but the bottom half sports the phrase "R-Hybrid." This wouldn't be remarkable if the "R" in R-Hybrid weren't the same style as the "R" in the Nissan GT-R's badge, right down to the serifs.
While it's easy to see this as grasping at straws, it makes a fair degree of sense. The R35 GT-R may be a dominant performance machine, but it's been around since 2008, which is donkey years in the automotive industry. And based on the recent crop of hybridized hypercars and racecars, a hybrid GT-R doesn't seem like such a stretch.
As Car And Driver points out, figuring out that the GT-R will go hybrid isn't hard - figuring out when it will arrive, is. The buff book rightly points out that a new GT-R isn't expected until 2017, but that designing and trademarking a badge four years ahead of time is a bit odd. Car and Driver speculates that we could see a mildly hybridized R35, although the chances do seem remarkably low. Head over to C/D for a more thorough rundown on why this just might be a GT-R badge, including comparisons with other R-badged Nissans.

Nissan NV200 Chicago Taxi looking for a #HailYes

Nissan may be loaning out its small van to General Motors for its Chicago Auto Show debut, but that doesn't mean that Chevrolet is the only one with new NV200-based wares to share. On the heels of launching its Taxi Of Tomorrow for New York City, the Japanese automaker is giving America's Second City a livery of its own.
Shown here in a green and white paint scheme that "expresses a modern take on a historically popular Chicago taxi color," this NV200 Chicago Taxi is the company's less-than-subtle bid to capture some of the city's cab business, which is estimated to have about 7,000 units in service. Nissan is urging the public to generate discussion on social media and hopefully capture local taxi fleet operators' attention with a #HailYes campaign.
Beyond its unique appearance, this NV200 appears untouched, which means it's still powered by a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine backed by a version of Nissan's ubiquitous XTronic continuously variable transmission.