Not long after Ferris Bueller charms Cameron out of the keys to his dad's prized Ferrari (cue the Yello song "Oh Yeah"), you can just barely pick out Ferris shouting "Redline! Redline! Redline!" as he mashes the throttle and bolts out of the frame toward downtown Chicago.
This morning, it was me doing the throttle mashing. But my exclamation "Redline! Redline. Redline ... Redline?" was not one of pure exuberance; I was counting the damn things.
That's right, our 2009 Nissan GT-R has four redlines. At least. And that's not including any temperature or pressure gauges.
Of course the twin-turbo V6 engine has a redline, and it's 7,000 rpm. But the GT-R also has redlines for steering (0.5 lateral g, as shown above), braking (0.4 longitudinal g) and acceleration (0.3 longitudinal g.)
Snapping any kind of picture at all of what happened when I exceeded 0.5 lateral g wasn't easy in the pre-dawn hours of my commute. Slow shutter speed + 0.7 lateral g = blurry photo. But at least you can see that the g trace-line turned red.
The trace resumes its normal white color as soon as the g level drops back down below 0.5 g a second or two later. This car isn't even close to breaking a sweat or squealing a tire at 0.5 to 0.7 g. Heck, the GT-R's limit is upwards of 0.95 g.
The massive 6-piston fixed caliper brakes that'll stop the car from 60 mph in less than 100 feet brakes will trigger a redline at 0.4 g -- a level your mom might exceed if she catches a late yellow light.
And you only get 0.3 g of acceleration before that electronic "tsk, tsk" kicks in. Heck, the GT-R used-up 0.1 g of that while parked due to the slant of my driveway.
This all seems rather silly. If you exceed the engine's redline, you'll blow something up. So there's a rev-limiter to help keep you and your wallet out of trouble. Fine. No arguement there.
But these dynamic redlines seem like a layer of lawyer-excreted material added over the top of a gimmicky videogame display. Besides being set arbitrarily low, they're too far out of the normal line-of-sight to be of much use. If anything, I think these redlines will have the opposite effect:
"Watch this. Bet you I can keep it in the red all the way through this off-ramp." or "Watch this. Let's see if I can accelerate in the red all the way up this ramp on-ramp."
Splat.
Never mind the fact that there's no way to freeze the screen or record your stats to look at later for legitimate uses such as analyzing your GT-R's performance at a track day. You've got to get your buddy to snap a picture while you're in the middle of it.
I mean, who would DO that?
Dan Edmunds, Director of Vehicle Testing @ 16,302 miles
foxgtr says:
04:24 PM, 01/27/09
Actually, there is a way you can have the information pulled. Decoding what it shows is a little bit more difficult and it takes about 20 minutes to download all the information. If you visit your GT-R dealer, they should be able to pull all the information from the onboard computer system and show you the telemetry. Printing is several hundred pages, but on their computer you can see all the information.
texases says:
07:59 PM, 01/27/09
I remember an article in the '80s talking about 'keeping it on the buzzer (or bell, I forget)' on a JDM car while driving around Tokyo, where exceeding a set speed set off the buzzer. Sounds like (much) more of the same.
platf1 says:
08:35 PM, 01/27/09
I thought the GT-R had a USB port where you could download the information.
ktinsd says:
10:17 PM, 01/27/09
The "keeping it on the buzzer" thing was a rotary engine thing. On old RX2s, RX3s etc Mazda put a buzzer in to give you an audible clue when you hit the redline. Since there wasn't much to break (couldn't float any valves) some folks buzzed their motors all the time and shifted down when the buzzer stopped. Couldn't happen now with tattletale ECUs.
stevefromatl says:
05:40 AM, 01/28/09
There is a compact flash drive that you can download information to. But, it only records the stopwatch lap times in a spreadsheet, not the other important information.
It is stupid to be able to have all of this G information without being able to record it for review later. It is impossible to drive aggressively and look at the screen at the same time unless you want to crash.
Also, the scale will change on the cornering G screen. If you are constantly hitting the 1 G mark, the scale will adjust to 1.5 Gs as the limit on the screen.
ddoouugg says:
02:37 PM, 01/28/09
At least there is no limiter for them. At first I thought that's what you meant.