It’s easy to chuckle at the Nissan Juke’s wild styling, in fact it’s pretty much common place for Nissan to roll out quirky designs (think cubes). Despite the initial urge, you might want to choke back laughter because this is no joke, this is the Juke-R.
That’s right, it’s what happens when someone at Nissan has a nightmare where he drops a Juke on top of a GT-R and wakes up raving about his brilliant idea.
Before you get too excited, you can’t order one of these roid-raging crossovers. Nissan Europe and its technical partner RML says this is a special street legal concept car. They plan to make one left-hand and one right-hand drive version.
From the photos you can see the all-around aggressive facelift Nissan gave the car, including flared fenders and a two-piece spoiler jutting off the rear. It also gets a matte black finish mated with 20-inch RAYS wheels, a widened front bumper boasting larger air vents and a sculpted side skirt.
The Interior reflects how much change the car really went through at RML during the 22 weeks of engineering that brought this freakish child to life. The rear seats are gone, replaced by a race-spec roll cage. The cockpit now has two racing seats, a GT-R sourced steering wheel, 7-inch touch screen, pedals and dials.
Of course it wouldn’t be that hard to slap a few extras on the Juke to make it look cool, but Nissan really wasn’t fooling around. The guys at RML, who have worked with Nissan on many performance projects, managed to reengineer the Juke to accept the GT-R’s 480 horsepower 3.8-liter bi-turbocharged V6 engine as well as its all-wheel drive system, gearbox and suspension.
According to Nissan, the Juke-R will go through testing late this month before being let loose to tear up public roads.
[Source: CarScoop.com]