7 Reasons Why Owning A Nissan Skyline Sucks

1. You live in someone else's shadow

When you own a GT, GTT, GTS or GTST, you are always being compared to the GTR… and not in a good way:
“It doesn’t have the RB26DETT”. “It’s not a real Skyline”. “Where is the turbo?”.
And if you do own a GT-R, you probably hear:
“It’s not pushing 1000HP like on YouTube”.
There are many varieties of Skylines out there, around half of which are naturally-aspirated. Some have as little as 94HP thanks to the measly RB20E single cam, while others break the 1000HP mark with the custom-built RB30DET.

2. Awesome car! Oh, it's auto... walk away

Car enthusiasts vs the world: as much as we all would love a Skyline to be manual, sadly many are automatic, or just as bad, tiptronic. This should, theoretically, drive the price of the vehicle down if it’s an auto, but instead has driven the price of manuals up.
However, you can still have fun with an auto. See the little marks at the back of the gear lever that say D4, D3 and 2? Those will lock your car into one of those gears so you can enjoy bouncing off the rev limiter and stretching the gears for all they’re worth.

If you still don’t like the idea of not stomping a clutch into every gear, you can convert your Skyline to a manual. It requires a little bit of labour; the hard part is finding all the parts needed for the conversion.

3. Finally, a manual

You sit in the driver’s seat that hugs you like it should. You turn on the engine and give it a rev. It smoothly shifts into first gear then you take off. At 20kmh you push it into second and crunch!

Yep, that’s the gearbox for you! Notoriously crunching into 2nd and 3rd gears while the rest all shift smoothly. Or do they? Then you notice that you have the clutch pushed all the way in, but it grinds loudly when you try to put it in reverse.
That’s the 25DET gearbox for you. Pulled straight out of a low-mileage M-Spec and it still crunches.

4. Parts, parts everywhere, but not a single one fits

I know, that’s a bit exaggerated, and it applies to nearly every car out there. But we always seem to find out the hard way.
Before any of you go out buying that set of coilovers from your friend’s neighbour’s cousin’s Skyline, just remember that there are four-wheel-drive Skylines. There are four-wheel-steering skylines. There are new models and there are old models. There are new series of the same car, and old series. Facelift, pre-facelift. Skylines, Stageas, Laurels and Cefiros. And then there is the worst of them all: the GT-R.

And the parts you want aren’t interchangeable. The 4WD has a different gearbox. The R34 is shorter. The 4WS has different suspension. The turbo skylines have different brakes. And nothing from the GT-R fits anything else.

5. Everyone knows more than you do

Or so they think. Whether they’re just a fan or an RFB mechanic, everyone is full of advice that is not always helpful. “All Skyline’s have the RB26DETT”. Says the kid in the parking lot. “You can fit these parts on your car”. But they came from a GT-R. “That turbo bolts right in”. With a bit of welding, a $400 intercooler, $500 injectors and a $150 fuel pump. And you run the risk of blowing your once naturally-aspirated engine. Great idea!

6. Unwanted attention

From both sides of the law. In my country, Skylines are probably the single most stolen cars. Stolen by chop-shops for their parts, stolen by teens who want to skid something around at night, stolen by criminals to use in other crimes.

Also, most Skyline owners I talk to tell me they get stopped by the police just because they drive a Skyline. But why Skylines? they are a cheap way of going fast and are easy to skid. Also, there are laws against un-certified modifications. So if you drive a Skyline that looks lowered, be prepared to be pulled over.

7. That's not a Skyline

Sold under Infiniti as the G35 in certain countries, the Nissan V35 is in fact a Skyline. It was meant to be the successor to the R34, but it failed to do so despite having a faster motor and all the technology you would expect from its predecessors. The long front, the circle tail-lights and the racing lines along the body from the previous versions were all done away with.

Instead the world was given a car that could easily be mixed up with the Nissan Maxima and Teana. Maybe it was the un-aggressive looks, the end of the Nissan straight-six, the way it seemed to target families as a luxury car the way Lexus had done, or maybe a combination of all, but this is the car that ended the Skyline lineage.

This content was originally posted by a Car Throttle user on our Community platform and was not commissioned or created by the CT editorial team.