Nissan Is Building an All-Electric R32 Skyline GT-R Restomod

Yesterday, Nissan Japan teased something interesting on Twitter. A video of an R32 Skyline GT-R, cloaked in darkness, slowly being illuminated by lights. The engine featured the distinct sound of the GT-R’2 RB26 engine, but the tweet’s text teased something else: An electrified Skyline.

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Specifically, the electrified passion project of a single Nissan engineer. The unnamed creator, who joined Nissan out of a love for the GT-R, wants to bring the R32 into the modern era by giving it the bleeding edge of propulsion technology.

Both the tweet and the linked website for the R32 EV project are in Japanese, but Google Translate gets us at least close to Nissan’s original meaning. The project appears to be a one-off concept, not any kind of factory-backed conversion like Nissan’s restarted production of R32 parts, so don’t expect this enthusiast engineer to take your GT-R in for upgrades.

The project follows Toyota’s electric restomod efforts, meaning we could eventually see a point where every Initial D battle is remade with restored electric cars. Toyota may have rebuilt Takumi’s Panda Trueno as a hydrogen vehicle, but we’ll now have Wataru’s Levin and Nakazato’s Skyline GT-R ready to do battle. Maybe Mazda can join the fray next, and give us a battery-powered version of Keisuke’s RE Amemiya RX-7.

Electrification of beloved classic cars is always a contentious issue, with some people claiming it kills off the original car’s spirit. To those detractors, I say: The original cars are still there. This R32 is getting its electric drivetrain as a passion project, and it’s a project at the scale of one single car. Every other R32 remains, with an RB26 throwing its horsepower to all four wheels. Both the ICE and EV versions of the GT-R can be interesting, incredible machines — give the new kid a shot.