Comfortable, yes, although anyone but the smallest and slightest of drivers or passengers will find the stiffly bolstered “sculpted performance bucket seats” quite confining and literally a pain in the rear. I’m tall but not terribly wide, and I found the driver’s seat to be too narrow in both the back and seat. I asked every passenger who rode with me, and only one especially small guy thought the seats were passable. Definitely made with the 5-foot-6, 120-pound race-car driver in mind.

GT-R interior is both purposely sporting and luxurious, but those tightly bolstered seats can be a pain. (Photo: Nissan)

The seats certainly do hold you in place when the GT-R is making one of its amazingly fast changes in direction, however.

Nissan also touts GT-R as a four-seater, but every person on board must be pretty small for the tight back seat to be usable. Otherwise, the rear-seat passengers had better be legless.

The dashboard is a dedicated high-performance array with a large tachometer in the middle and lots of information in plain sight. If that’s not enough, the large video screen can be set up to display every kind of gauge and calculation you could possible imagine, obviously geared for track use. Quite impressive, really.

Otherwise, the interior is nicely tailored with leather, chrome and carbon-fiber accents, combining luxury appointments with a straight-up performance edge.

The exterior styling grew on me. At first, I thought the Nissan looked a bit too conventional, especially compared with the expressively aerodynamic look of most supercars. But it’s hunkered, broad-shouldered design became more appealing the more I lived with it. And if there’s any doubt about its sporting intentions, take a look at the carbon-fiber aerodynamics in the lower front and rear, the twin air scoops on the hood or the massive quartet of chrome exhaust outlets. Four pipes for six cylinders? Guess that works.

The huge wing on the back of the Black Edition version is a beautiful piece of carbon-fiber magic. (Photo: Bob Golfen)

I drove the Black Edition GT-R, which is a notch above the Premium model mainly because of the addition of a fairly glorious dry-carbon-fiber wing mounted on the trunk. Not only does it look super cool, it’s coated with a material that allows you to feel the weave of the carbon fiber when you run your finger across it.

The 2013 Nissan GT-R Premium has a base price of $97,820, including shipping, which is $6,870 more than the 2012 version. Go for the carbon-fiber-winged Black Edition, and you add $11,200 on top of that, for a total of $107,320, with shipping. By the way, the Black Edition version I drove was Bright Red. Go figure.

The prices might be out of reach for most folk, but GT-R has to be seen as a striking bargain in outright performance and exceptional content, comparing well against supercars that cost twice that.

It’s also cool that Nissan, best known for its high-volume sedans and SUVs, has stepped up with this remarkable machine. Sure, Nissan is a top competitor in GT racing and it has given us some great Z cars over the years, but this is a quite a step beyond what you’d expect from such a mainstream automaker.

Chevrolet with its top-dog performance versions of Corvette comes close, as does Chrysler with its new SRT Viper. Perhaps even Ford with the Shelby GT500.

But GT-R is something else again, an amazing engineering tour de force that aspires to performance greatness. And it could be argued that it’s already there.

Details

Vehicle type: Two-plus-two passenger, two door coupe, all-wheel drive.
Engine: 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged V6, 545 horsepower at 6,000 rpm, 463 pound-feet of torque at 3,200 rpm.
Transmission: Dual-clutch automatic with paddle shifters.
Wheelbase: 109.4 inches.
Overall length: 183.8 inches.
Curb weight: 3,818 pounds.
EPA mileage rating: 16 city, 23 highway.

Bob Golfen, Automotive Editor for SPEED.com, is a veteran auto writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, with a passion for collector cars, car culture and the automotive lifestyle. SPEED.com fans can email Bob Golfen at