Next Nissan GT-R – 'no way' will Japan's incoming supercar slayer be electric
Nissan CEO, Ivan Espinosa, has confirmed that the GT-R’s return is a priority and that it will not be all-electric
August 26th 2025 was a symbolic day for Nissan. Production of the R35 Nissan GT-R finally ceased, after 18 years and 48,000 all-wheel-drive, twin-turbo V6 performance cars. The news embodied the company’s predicament: the product pipeline had stopped flowing, merger talks with Honda had failed, and Nissan was hurtling towards a 30-billion yen loss for the first half of the year. But sometimes the darkest hour comes before the dawn: a new Nissan GT-R is coming, and 'no way' will it be electric, according to CEO Ivan Espinosa.
Eight months on, Nissan’s fightback is well and truly underway. In Yokohama last month, Espinosa outlined his Nissan Vision – with ‘heartbeat’ cars packing genuine performance playing a key role in restoring the brand’s lustre, including the GT-R.
Sitting down with Espinosa he was clear that delivering the R36 GT‑R was a priority. ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied. ‘It’s one of the strongest brands in our portfolio. It’s not only a car, it’s a symbol of many things inside and outside the company. [There] definitely needs to be a new GT‑R: it will come.’
But he refused to be drawn on whether Nissan would plump for a pure electric drivetrain, presaged by the 2023 Hyper Force concept. With its glasshouse shaped like a motorcycle helmet’s visor, exaggerated wheelarches, a pronounced rear wing and that tell-tale black and red badge, the design clearly hinted at the next GT‑R. So did the power split to all four wheels – but with its 1341bhp generated by an all-electric drivetrain.
> The R35 Nissan GT-R is dead after 18 years, and it bows out as a legend
But that was before impressive electric hypercars such as the Rimac Nevera and Lotus Evija proved dead on arrival. That isn’t lost on Richard Candler, Nissan’s global head of product strategy.
‘What we’ve seen so far is that electric sports cars haven’t been hugely popular,’ he told us. ‘I think they’ll come as battery technology takes its next leap, but the current lithium chemistries are not capable of producing a GT‑R-type product. We’re not going to go with batteries in the next generation. No way.’
Next Nissan GT-R engine – it'll be a hybrid
But that doesn’t mean the next GT‑R won’t use electric power to amp up performance. ‘[GT‑R] will have to be electrified because of emissions regulations at some level,’ Candler explained. ‘It’s just common sense that you would have a sense of electrification, but the battery’s a limiting factor.’
So the next GT‑R is set to follow BMW's M5 with hybrid petrol/electric power. The BMW produces 717bhp – some 125bhp more than the highly developed GT‑R Nismo Final Edition – but is saddled with a 2435kg kerb weight, the kind of bloat Nissan will be desperately battling.
> Could the new Nissan Z finally be making its way to the UK?
Electrification should help the R36 meet European regulations when it arrives towards the end of the decade – and in the meantime Nissan has a stopgap up its sleeve.
Its heartbeat models are ‘the vehicles that represent the [brand’s] essence, carrying emotion and heritage while advancing innovation,’ said Espinosa, namechecking the first modern mainstream EV, the Leaf, the Patrol 4x4 – and the Z sports car.
Nissan unleashing a new generation of performance cars in Europe won’t be easy. But Toyota has shown the way, promising its V8 hybrid GR GT coupe will come here. The GT-R, the new Z and more Nismo models are coming, some sooner, some later.
The Skyline teasers seen here were revealed during the main presentation at the Nissan Vision event, with Espinosa saying Skyline ‘represents the origin and soul of Nissan’ and that it would be ‘a reimagined icon of Japanese engineering and driving passion with performance and precision’.
Though the car hasn’t been shown in full, there’s no missing that it rolls hard on classic Skyline iconography, from the circular rear light graphics to the retro Skyline script – a revival of the badge last seen on the Hakosuka of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Also detectable are notes of shared design DNA with the Hyper Force concept, particularly in that bluff snout and with those flanking daytime-running lights.
Nissan’s commitment to V6 power is assured by the fact that Espinosa has promised to reboot Nissan’s luxurious offshoot Infiniti with among other models, a ‘performance-oriented V6 sedan’. It’s with this model that the new Nissan Skyline saloon, could potentially be twinned.
The Nissan GT-R and Skyline are core models in evo’s history, the R34 Skyline GT-R being the cover star all the way back in issue 009 and the R35 GT-R taking the evo Car of the Year crown at the first time of asking, in 2008.
