Two significantly similar cars, no doubt about that. Still, each one has something different to offer. Having both cars powered by petrol engines and utilizing the 2-door coupe body style within the same 'Sports car' segment, the only major difference here really is their wheel drive configuration (rear for the Porsche and 4 x 4 in the case of the Nissan). The first one has a Porsche-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 6-cylinder, 24-valves 400hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 6-cylinder, 24-valves 485hp engine designed by Nissan.

Unfortunatelly, neither of the two vehicles was submitted to the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) testing. This makes it virtually impossible for me to pick one over the other and I'm generally against buying such cars as the safety should really always come first. That aside, let's consider some other aspects which affect safety. Both vehicles belong to the sports car segment, which is generally classifying them somewhere in the middle safety-wise, still it doesn't help us solve our dilemma, does it? On the other hand, if we'd like to consider vehicle mass in this context too, which we definitely should, the Japanese car offers a considerable difference of 23% more metal.

Reliability is not the best thing to consider on the make level, but it is worth mentioning that Nissan is significantly less fault-prone, at least on all of the models level. That's the official data, while our visitors describe reliability of Porsche with an average rating of 3.9, and models under the Nissan badge with 4.3 out of 5. Some independent research have also placed 911 as average reliability-wise, and GT-R is more or less at the same level.Above it all, drivers of cars with the same engine as the German car rank it on average as 3.0 out of 5, exactly the same as the other one.

Nissan is undoubtly more agile, reaching 100km/h in 1 seconds less than its competitor. In addition to that it accelerates all the way to 310 kilometers per hour, 6km/h more than the other car. When it comes to fuel economy an obvious choice would be the German car, averaging around 9.5 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers (30 mpg), in combined cycle. That's 31% difference compared to the Japanese car!

Nissan appears just a bit more reliable, although the difference is truly marginal. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In my opinion, everything taken into account, the Japanese car offers significantly better overall protection, taking the lead here. It all continues in the same direction, with Nissan outracing its opponent in any situation possible, making it better choice for boy racers. It does come at a cost though, and that's the fuel consumption... At the end, as much as I'd like to give you a winner here, it's simply a pure tie if you ask me. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, out of 12.000+ vehicles we currently have in our database.