Two Nismo Juke configurations – front-wheel drive with a 6-speed manual transmission, and all-wheel drive with a CVT – are now available.
Nismo, the nascent performance brand of Nissan, and Williams Advanced Engineering will collaborate on the development of high performance road cars. In a release, Nissan said that Williams’ knowledge of aerodynamics, simulation and material science would be used by the development team from Nismo currently working on developing future Nismo products for launch worldwide stating in 2014.
While Nismo is known to motorsports and performance car enthusiasts in Japan and to millions of gamers, the brand is virtually unknown and certainly unrecognized in global enthusiast circles. A GT-R Nismo will be the third Nismo-badged model following the launch of the Juke Nismo and 370Z Nismo this year.
All of the cars that the performance versions will be built from what are slow selling model in the U.S., selling year-to-date through May only 14,418 Juke, 2,627 370Z and 486 GT-R models. The NISMO versions will be built in the same plants as the standard models.
The Juke Nismo long on sale in Europe and Japan and just launched in the United States in the spring. Nissan’s most popular sports car, 370Z Nismo, is now in its second generation in the U.S., with a revised 2014 370Z Nismo set for sale this summer.
Last February, Nismo kicked off the start of a new era in its development as a global performance brand with the official opening of a new global headquarters in Yokohama, Japan. Nissan has invested in a new facility for Nismo’s operations, redeveloping a former production site to give it the resources for expanding beyond motorsports engineering to encompass performance car development. The new headquarters allows the Nismo team to be co-located in one place, bringing together the functional areas for key activities and technical and competition expertise under one roof.
The 180-member team is now located inside Nissan’s Powertrain Engineering complex. The workshop, engine shop, rooms for fabrication, grinding and carbon composite processes are consolidated into the same floor space along with a parts warehouse. A new larger showroom allows up to eight vehicles to be displayed, while the retail area is now almost twice the size of the previous store in the Omori factory.
