GTR Forums - Nissan Skyline GT-R Community - "Ghosn says the car will be sold here."

Here's an Autoweek article I found about the R35:

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Nissan Skyline GT-R coming to U.S., but not until ’07

MARK VAUGHN
Published Date: 10/28/03

NISSAN CHIEF CARLOS Ghosn confirms the Skyline GT-R will debut at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2007, with customer sales starting soon after that. The car will make “around 400 hp” and offer “top-level driving performance.”

Video game fans on these shores who have long enjoyed the high-speed thrills of the GT-R will have a chance to drive it (so long as they can pony up the cash). Ghosn says the car will be sold here.

Sure, but why the long wait? Well, it’s not as bad as the first proposal, which was for a 2008 or 2009 GT-R launch. And, if you haven’t noticed, Nissan has been working on a lot of other products lately—and doing a pretty good job with them, too—so there weren’t spare engineers to toil away on a fairly low-volume supercar. At one point, the company was looking for a partner to help share development of the GT-R, but could not find one with whom it was happy.

Ghosn says the GT-R will offer “top performance worldwide, not just compared to our cars.

“If you look at a car and think it’s a tiger, you’re not going to be happy if you get in and drive it and it’s a cat,” Ghosn explains.

Ghosn says the price will be relatively reasonable: “You won’t have the feeling you’re being ripped off.”

That’s still kind of vague, but it sounds like the GT-R will not be another half-million-dollar Enzo/SLR/Carrera GT supercar, at least not in the finance department.

The exterior will probably not look like the concept car shown at Tokyo two years ago, either, though the decision on which of many design proposals submitted has not been made.

More Nissan news

In case anyone was counting, Nissan is trimming platforms. In 1999 it had 24 platforms, with five of them sitting under 62 percent of its vehicles. It is on its way to 15 platforms by 2005, with the top five beneath 91 percent of its products. Many of those 2005s will be shared with Renault.