> According to my auto mechanic friends Nissan once ranked up there with Toyota and Honda for reliability, but their quality plummeted after the Renault deal.

Nissan went to crap when they took a controlling stake in JATCO and started using those god awful CVT's in everything, and then stopped putting any effort into their sports cars to keep them competitive enough to lure enthusiasts to their brand. I owned a GT-R for several years and it was a great car, but it's going on 13 years of the same generation and the 370z is hardly any different from the 350z that first came out in 2002. I could rant for hours, I used to love Nissan. I'm hoping the 400z will turn things around for them in the eyes of enthusiasts if it's priced reasonably.

Exactly this! Ghosn saved Nissan by focusing on optimizing and reducing costs and while that must've helped a lot in the short/medium term it came at a cost in the long term. It's as if Nissan had gotten stuck in the last decade of tech for cars. They went from competing with Porsche and having popular electric cars to basically being an afterthought in the market.

To be fair R35 GT-R was Ghosn's project.

Competing with Porsche? Can you expound on that?

The R35 GT-R took down everything from Ferraris to Porsches and Lamborghinis when it first came out, both in straight line speed and handling on the track.

Results at 3m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDP7Pty8Qnw&t=130s

Probably a bit of acting, but Jeremy Clarkson had to be carted off the track while driving one because he injured his neck on a particularly tight corner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXFSVoVqhYw

Let me share a gem:

https://youtu.be/9ElvaHArai4

do activate the subtitles!

Best MOTORing January 2011. ""Super Sports Battle in Sugo""

Cars: NISSAN GT-R, MB SLS AMG, FERRARI 430 SD, PORSCHE 911Turbo S, AUDI R8 5.2

Drivers:Keiichi ""DK"" Tsuchiya Naomi Hattori, Takayuki Kinoshita, Seiji Ara, Tetsuya Tanaka

And ten years later a 130 grand car (would that be the cheapest in the field back in 2010? Was the corvette or lotus the cheapest in that clip?) would eviscerate them by... two seconds?

Even setting aside reliability, the Nissan CVT is so awful to drive. The power delivery in every car I drove with one (always a rental) is incredibly mushy and the constant-RPM engine drone grates like a fly buzz.

Yea, they are absolutely the worst. They gave a Murano loaner while my GT-R was getting its transmission replaced and that piece of junk sat in my driveway and didn't move for a month. High performance, low performance, they offer some terrible transmissions across their entire lineup! As much as I want to defend the GR6 because it is phenomenal when it works and the stock housing can take an insane amount of power compared to other DCT's, mine died after only 10k miles and it was a 2015 model, which was supposed to be a non-issue after like 2011 from the launch control updates.

Yes, CVTs are crap. Every time I consider purchasing a car (used or new) I pass over the CVT offerings — which include most (all?) of Nissan's line up.

I won't disagree tha CVTs are crap, but they were an attempt for better gas mileage / carbon emissions reduction.

I have heard they are improving, but by the time they figure them out the ICE car will probably be utterly obsolete.