Scorching halos

While the Challenger looks to the past, Nissan's GT-R brims with the future. As a result, its much more expensive than the Challenger and quicker. It's also a lot more thrilling to drive fast, but much less pleasant for regular use. It's best saved for track day or, at the very least, winding roads with lax speed enforcement.

The GT-R is new to America but it follows a line of Skyline GT-Rs dating back to the early 1970s in Japan. That car already had a cult following among American fans of Japanese performance cars.

The GT-R is a four-seater with a pair of slightly useful back seats for your thrill-seeking kids. But it has the spirit of a two-seat race car. Under the hood, it gets 480 horsepower out of a 3.8-liter V6 engine with two turbochargers, according to Nissan.

The six-speed automatic transmission works like a computer controlled manual transmission. Instead of one clutch, though, it has two so the instant one gear disengages the next one takes over with no lag time.

Combined with the GT-R's as-needed all-wheel-drive -- whenever the back wheels start to slip, the front wheels start pulling -- the result is that as much power as possible goes to moving the car. That, combined with the fact that Nissan is substantially understating the engine's real horsepower output, according to tests by Motor Trend magazine, makes for seemingly boundless performance.

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