**The ARA Nismo: A Comprehensive Review**

We had the opportunity to drive the ARA Nismo, and I must say that it's a very competent car at higher speeds. The first thing that struck me was its ability to put a smile on my face. As I put it into gear and accelerated, I felt a sense of confidence that I hadn't experienced in quite some time. The mid-range punch is really nice, and when you come off throttle on the Apex and want to come out of the corner, you can really play with the car. The instant torque delivery is one of the nicest things about having an electric vehicle like this.

But what really impressed me was the road itself. I know it sounds strange, but coming from a country where roads are not as spectacular as they are here in Japan, I have to say that this road is sensational. It's a joy to drive on, and I found myself smiling more than once as I navigated through the twists and turns. The car feels very confident at higher speeds, but if you're going quite quickly and hit a bump, it can feel a bit unsettled by the mass of the car.

One area where I think the Nismo falls short is in its braking performance. The brake pedal has a rather long travel to it, and even on this lovely turnpike road, there were a couple of occasions where we overworked the brakes and got a nice smell of brake pad. It's not a huge issue, but I think a bigger set of brake discs and pads would have been a good idea.

Despite its limitations, I really like the styling on the outside of the car. The Nismo touches add a sporty flair that I think looks great. And I've always been a fan of the interior design of ARA cars. It's clean, simple, and easy to use. My only criticism is that the infotainment system could be improved, but that's a minor quibble.

The biggest disappointment for me was the fact that the Nismo feels like a grown-up car in the UK market, particularly compared to other electric vehicles like the Ionic 5N. The modifications and tuning tweaks have been made to make it more mature and competent on the road, which is exactly what I think they've done well. It's not a drifting, n-to-60 launch control kind of car, but that's not necessarily what most people want from their cars.

One thing that really stands out about this car is its mid-range punch. It delivers plenty of that, and it's exactly what you need if you want to have a bit of fun on the way home from work. The suspension setup is very competent, and with a slight tweak to the brakes, I think it would be an all-round complete package.

**Conclusion**

Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed with the ARA Nismo. It's a car that delivers on its promises and exceeds my expectations in many areas. While it may not be the most exciting car out there, it's certainly a great choice for anyone looking for a comfortable, competent, and reliable electric vehicle. And who knows? With a little tweak to the brakes, I think it could become an all-round complete package.

**The Comment Section**

We'd love to hear from you! What do you think of the ARA Nismo? Would you be tempted by its sporty tweaks and add-ons? Let us know in the comments below. And if you have any questions or opinions about the car, feel free to share them with us.

**The Road**

As I mentioned earlier, the road is a major part of what makes this car special. It's not just the Nismo itself that's impressive – it's also the road on which we drove it. Coming from a country where roads are not as spectacular as they are here in Japan, I have to say that this road was sensational.

**The Final Thoughts**

As I said at the beginning of this review, there's nothing quite like driving a car that puts a smile on your face. And the ARA Nismo delivers on that promise in spades. It may not be perfect – it has its limitations and areas for improvement – but overall, I think it's a great choice for anyone looking for a comfortable, competent, and reliable electric vehicle.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys and welcome to ped and welcome to Japan that in the distance is Mount Fuji sadly Fuji San is shrouded by clouds today and is not putting in an appearance maybe a bit later on in the day and that is the allnew Nissan ARA Nismo now I've come to Japan to be one of the first people outside of Nismo to drive their new spin on the area and I'm really excited to see what it's like I did experience one at the Tokyo e earlier this year as a passenger during a hot lap around the Formula E circuit and I know ARA well having r a two-wheel drive variant as a handy group long-termer a car that impressed but it really didn't have the performance or the kind of driver oriented characteristics that I look for in a car but by all accounts the guys at Nismo have done exactly that to that car more power more handling more driver Focus so if you're not familiar with Nismo Nismo is the kind of Motorsport and tuning wing of Nissan originally a separate company now part of the Nissan family and they have this Nismo branding this Nismo treatment they do to cars much like bmwm Audi Sport the same kind of vibe and they are actually 40 years old this year now in the UK Market you may well know them they did a Nismo Juke uh they've done a Nismo GTR and they did a Nismo Zed which is a car that I absolutely adore but sadly we don't get in Europe I actually drove one of those yesterday but now they're coming back they haven't had a n Mo car in the UK market for a little while so they're coming back with this car this car will start deliveries in the UK in the new year so we're we're getting a super early look at it so let me walk you around the car and talk through some of the differences between this and a standard area now first up standard area is available in a two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive variant the four-wheel drive variant being Nissan's e Force four-wheel drive system which I drove in Finland earlier this year so the Nismo variant no surprise they've used the eforce four-wheel drive platform to build on they've not changed the motors or the battery packs so it still has an 87 KW battery pack what they've done is they've changed the tuning of the motors and the power delivery from the motors and they've increase the horsepower now to 429 horsepower so a significant power lift from the top speec eforce area now you might be thinking straight away what they could have gone more than that I mean if you look at this car's natural competitors something like a Tesla uh model 3 or model y performance or maybe something like the Hyundai ionic 5n they're way more power even the Kia ev6 GT they're up at like 600 horsepower so you don't look at this car just based on numbers if you did I think You' dismiss it quite quickly I mean let's face it 420 odd horsepower is still a huge amount the torque figure is still the same at 600 Newton met that hasn't changed but what has changed is how that power and torque come in to really change the driving characteristics of the car the other thing that's changed on this car is the exterior styling and there's been a lot of work done on Arrow so let's start at the front still the very distinctive front end of the area but obvious differences you've got this little chin spoiler here with Nismo branding and red pipe work but the arrow work starts as you come around the side you've got a couple of things here you've got this little kind of Canard that sits on the side and that that creates a Vortex that goes down the side of the car and then you've got these little curtain entrances here and that provides an air curtain down the side so the purpose is to reduce lift um you might call it downforce my argument I guess would be really who buys a car of this category looking for downforce but it's all about highspeed stability and reducing lift and the arrow work that's been done on the car has reduced lift by something like 40% compared with a standard area and it starts at the front of the car but the really cool thing is it's not changed the drag coefficient so it's still as slippy through the air but just with less lift which is a tricky thing to do normally when you increase downforce on a car that makes the car a lot more draggy so these skirts produce a flow of air down the side of the car and the rear of the car has some really nice kicks and flicks round the back much more obvious Arrow work I love the two little shark fin antennas there but then you've got this top Wing or spoiler that's basically designed to to direct air flow along the rear wind screen onto this little lip spoiler here and then manage the air flow off the back of the car so as well as doing a lot of aerrow work I just think it looks fantastic and then down here we've got a quite aggressive diffuser certainly in terms of styling but again that's managing air flow underneath the car so aerodynamics very very very important in the car now there's also a little bit more era work down here so the side seals are different from the standard area as well next up big change is I'm very pleased to see a lovely sticky set of misham Pilot Sport EV tires now these tires have been specifically designed in conjunction between michelan and Nissan for this car they're not OEM marked but they do have a specific serial number to tie them in with this car and what they're aimed at doing is basically providing a much more grippy uh traction for both handling and also acceleration so the standard area has uh more Eco efficiency oriented tires so they've gone and now we got a nice set of sticky Pilot Sport EVS the other thing is these wheels uh and the way the the thin spokes work on the wheels that's really designed to try and help with cooling of brakes to get air out of the wheel well and out from inside the wheel and tire setup um but they should change the handling characteristics of this car a great deal and it's now if you've been tuning into the channel this year you will probably know that I've been working with Nissan around Formula E I came to the Tokyo e PR I went to London and one of the big things that Nissan are or the reason if you like they're in Formula E is the development and then trickle down technology into their rad car program and Nismo are the motor racing wing of Nissan and responsible for the Formula E team and and there's lots of the findings that they are getting from formul E that have trickled down into this car some of it is from the tires the way in which the mapping of power and torque delivery is done so it's it you can start to see that that that development of Road car tech from their racing program the other things though that Nismo have done with this car because so far okay it's increased the power a little bit the power deliveries changed it's got stickier tires and a bit more Arrow but it's got fundamentally different susp ion system so it's got different spring rates so 3% stiffer at the front 10% stiffer at the back different dampers so that's going to give the car completely different feel um the steering so it's got electronically assisted power steering but the the power assistance has changed completely it's a much lighter steering at slow speeds and even as you go up through the an increase up through the speed range the steering is is still lighter than the standard car and has more feel by all accounts we need to put that one to the test so it from the outside yes there's some styling changes but I think it's going to be very much a case with this car the sum of all those parts will give a really Dynamic feel the last thing to mention and again I might talk about this more when we're driving this afternoon is the eforce four-wheel drive system that distributes power and torque amongst the four wheels that's also been tuned to help with turning to help with balance in the corners to help with power on exit so that that extra power the 420 odd horsepower that we now have is there and usable and we quizzed the guys from Nismo yesterday and one of the questions why didn't you give it more power why didn't you kind of go silly and have 600 horsepower and the answer was well firstly this is It's a performance car that's really aimed at the road not at track it's not that you can't drive one of these on track but it's trying to give a sporty feel more performance but Road car performance that you can really tap in into on the public highway without going silly so the next thing we're going to do let's have a quick jump inside and show you some of the styling changes on the inside and then there are some insane roads in this area we're in an area about an hour and a half outside of Yokohama called hakone and it is beautiful for a start drop they're gorgeous but the roads oh they're amazing but let me just show you inside and then we'll go for a drive now first up in here standard area really however the trim and the choice materials is just stepped up quite a notch one of the things I like about Nismo when they do a car they just have this really cool way of styling it out so you've got suede or an Alcantara effect material on the dash red stitching this lovely red anodized um detailing a little Nismo badge just here and then you got the kind of fake wood trim that you get in ARA which is really nice these seats look very cool very comfortable again suede so they're they're they're they're supportive but they're not overly sporty so they'll you know they they don't dig into you but you don't feel like you're going to be going anywhere and then uh a specific to Nismo steering wheel with a red 12:00 stripe all very nice other changes there are now four Drive modes in this car so you've got Eco and snow mode which are exactly the same as they are in standard area even the mapping of the power is exactly the same it's not changed at all but then there's a sport mode and a Nismo mode and both of those have a different tune and a different throttle mapping and so on to the standard car well the standard car doesn't have Nismo mode at all so to step through those I think we go for a bit of a drive but the first impressions of the car it's a really nice place to be I think externally there are four colors that you can choose from all of them really nice they do a beautiful dark blue which looks fantastic especially with the red contrast piping that is the Hallmark of Nismo but yeah let's get some cameras up and go for a drive because I have a feeling that on the roads around here this car is going to be pretty special so we'll start our Drive we've got about an hour and a half Loop um that includes some really nice roads but I thought I'd just start off in the standard mode now I think I said earlier on in the video that there were there's the Eco and snow mode which are the same as standard area and then I think I said there was Sport and Nismo I was wrong it's standard and Nismo so I'm in standard at the moment um and one of the really nice displays on the dash is uh talk distribution display so you can basically see both on throttle and on regen where the where the torque's going I'm also in E pedal mode and B so I've got the maximum regenerative braking and it's really quite aggressive to the point where on a road like this when you're driving along at normal speed you don't really need to use the brake at all while we're talking about brakes the interesting thing I found out during the technical briefings yesterday is I assumed that with the increase in performance and all that kind of stuff they'd have a bigger brake kit but they don't they haven't really done a great deal to the brakes at all um so we'll see how they perform on the road I don't think that's a problem but when we were on track at the E PR the brakes did get quite hot in fact the professional driver I was with set fire to them we won't be doing that today but in this standard setting even though the the power delivery both power and torque curves are very very different to standard area it doesn't feel a great amount different the the main difference from remembering back to when I drove the ARA as a long termer that was the lower powered two wheel drive model this has a huge amount more go when you push the throttle down but at the moment we've got a very slow moped in front of us so let's go and find some twisty roads and give it a bit of Yahoo and then we'll put it up into Nismo mode and one of the things in Nismo mode that unfortunately is only in Japanese spec cars we're not going to get it in the UK is an on throttle noise which is derived from the Formula E car actually and an off throttle noise so when you go into regem breaking and we don't get that in the UK and it's such a shame cuz actually I think it sounds quite good let's see what uh this car can do I'm going to put it actually into Nismo mode let's face it we're in a Nismo so first things first I'm now driving a spaceship so you've got all of the kind of auditory tunings of a formula EC car now this noise isn't coming to the UK as I've mentioned and it may well be that after this drive I'm glad it isn't First Impressions off the line the initial bit of of acceleration in this car it's quick it does not to 60 in around about 5 Seconds not that much faster than the eforce area but the way that they've tuned the motor it's all about the mid-range punch that kind of 80 km to 120 km by all accounts it will do 80 to 20 sorry 80 to 120 faster than a GTR the brake the brake pedal isn't the best it's got a very long travel before anything happens so in normal driving it's got quite good mid Cor manners though oh this is turning into a very nice bit of road it's quite stable through the higher speed stuff it's 2.2 tons now the interesting thing is there's no weight saving at all between this and the standard area in fact this is a little bit heavier by about 10 kilos which again I don't really understand you would have thought if you're going to do a sporty version you drop some weight but there's slightly different tires which are a bit heavier but that is accounted for by a lighter wheel so unsprung Mass doesn't really change a great deal there's all of the arrow kicks and flicks on the car which I'm sure add a little bit of weight but it's not any lighter and it is quite difficult to disguise 2.2 tons that said mid corner it it does feel nice and stable and competent the brake pedal needs a lot of work the first time you put your foot on it it feels like the Brake's gone soft like it would do on a track day it doesn't really do anything and then it slowly bites up and you get a bit more a bit more of a feel the higher the speed you go the less effective the regenerative braking is on retarding the car it's doing a great job of putting energy back into the battery back that's a lovely long radius corner I tell you what I can see why they've sent us up here what a bit of Road this is that what am I doing there that's some miles an hour over the speed limit and it's doing that very competently indeed so I'm not sure about the sound I think it's a shame it's not coming to the UK I think they need a different sound I don't think if I just go back into standard mode the sound goes away and it you get that kind of super quiet e feeling and I just look at what the likes of Hyundai have done with ionic 5n and that artificial sound and I know it's artificial but it it just gives a little bit more interest and it you know at the end of the day petrol heads like me were always going to miss having I'm going to go here oh he's going to let me past it's very kind of him so yeah in standard mode it doesn't feel a lot slower to be honest the throttle mapping is different the delivery is different you just don't get all of the spaceship noises what you do start to hear is a little bit more of the road noise from the tires now the range is still being calculated the wltp measurements are still being done they expect the range to be around about 10% less than the same battery pack size Nissan ARA eforce and that's to do with the tires because the tires are stickier to help me go around Cor is quicker they got slightly more rolling resistance and they're going to have an adverse effect on Range but to be fair 10% isn't a great deal and I'd rather sacrifice that for the amount of grip I'm getting what a road this is it's a very confidence inspiring car when you the mid-range punch is really nice so as you come off throttle when you're on the Apex and you want to come out the corner you can really sort of play with a car just balance the car youve got that instant torque delivery which is the nice thing about having an EV but I tell you what people as we come up behind a slower car you need to come to Japan and do some driving cuz the road is Sensational I got to say this car does put a smile on your face final impressions of it well we've driven it quite a lot today and first things first is it is a very competent car at higher speeds the first thing is though I think primarily it's a everyday family car that if you want to have a bit of fun on your way home from work it's there for you to do it the suspension setup's very competent the car's got a lot of mass I've mentioned that already but in these higher speed Corners it's a real confidence inspiring car however when you are going quite quickly if it gets unsettled by a bump it's just a little bit of a you know moment because you you just start to feel that that mass take over in terms of power I quite like the way that they've delivered the power and the torque it's a miles faster car or certainly feels it than standard area it's not it's not one of these super ballistic EVS that does not to 60 and 3 seconds like a model y performance or model 3 Performance or ev6 gt but it's plenty fast enough for the public Highway the disappointment for me is the braking um the brake pedal has a real long travel to it and even just going up and down this lovely Turnpike Road there have been a couple of occasions where we've overwork the brakes and you get a nice smell of brake pad and it just doesn't seem to want to to the car and that's a shame I think a bigger set of brake discs and pads would have been a good idea but all in all I really like the styling on the outside I like the Nismo touches on the inside I've always been a fan of the inside of the area and I know I haven't done so much about the infotainment system about the room in the back the size of the boot that's all on my standard living with ARA video I'll put a link above you can go off and watch that this video was really all about what Nismo have done to barer just to turn the wick up a little bit and make it more of a driver's car and I think they've certainly done that um as I said the the I think the weakness it will have in the UK Market especially anybody who's driven ionic 5n or approaches this car at the same level as ionic 5n it's not it's a little bit more of a grownup car I think the modifications the tuning tweaks have been made have they they're done so to to make it uh mature and competent quick Road car and they've done that it's not a drifting uh n to 60 launch control off of a set of traffic lights kind of car but in a way isn't that what all cars are meant to be how many times do you really need to do n to 60 in under 3 seconds you have one of these high performance EVS you do that two or three times and it gets boring what you want is mid-range punch and this car delivers plenty of that what you want is cornering confidence and this car delivers plenty of that and with a slight tweak to the brakes I think it would be an all round complete package so I can't wait for this car to come to the UK and I can't wait to get my hands on one this guy's letting me past but put in the comments below what you think of the ARA Nismo this guy's letting me past I think they quite like seeing these Nismo cars out on the road here in Japan but yeah put in the comments what you think of arianismo is it a car that would tempt you to Electric the the extra sporty uh tweaks and sporty add-ons but if you enjoyed that please give me a thumbs up comments below are always welcome and if you haven't done so already please subscribe to peted for plenty more content to come and I'll see you on the next film I'm not quite so sure that the road's going to be as good as that one and if anybody spotted the slight continuity error with me changing color of car from Gray to Blue well done I'll see you on the next film take care guys drive safe ah\n"