Nissan “R-HYBRID” Emblem Really Looks Like It’s For the GT-R

A recent Nissan trademark application leaves little to the imagination—but presents much opportunity for waking nightmares. The company’s proposed “R-HYBRID” trademark should, if we follow the usual automotive vernacular, point to a sporty hybrid-electric vehicle. In and of itself, we’d take that. It’s not as though Nissan can be talked out of introducing more hybrids. (Nor could the company ever be disabused of the idea that CVTs were a-okay for the Maxima and Altima.) But this trademark app was filed with an image of what looks like an exterior badge. An exterior badge for a Nissan GT-R.

Check out the font for the “R-HYBRID” part of the emblem. (You can ignore Pure Drive; it’s just Nissan’s branding for cars that are more efficient than cars used to be, the same way Mazda sticks Skyactiv onto its trunklids.) As on the GT-R, Nissan is using a serif font here—serifs are the little strokes at the corners of some of the letters—and the first “R” in particular looks just like the “R” from the GT-R emblem. Look particularly closely, and you can see how that first “R” has been given a three-dimensional look by making the vertical and diagonal lines two-tone. Compare it to the badge from the GT-R:

The GT-R’s logo has the same serif strokes and actually is three-dimensional, with a ridge through the middle of the letter R. Just for the sake of comparison, below are the emblems from the 2007–2012 Sentra SE-R, the 2005–2006 Altima SE-R, and the  2002–2005 Sentra SE-R, respectively.

These three are not serif fonts—or, if you want to be all fancy about it, they’re sans serif. Italicized, yes, but no little decorations at the corners of the letters. Beyond that, Nissan doesn’t seem terribly interested in a performance-oriented Sentra or Altima these days, and those cars it does want to tune, like the Juke, are branded as Nismos. At that point, we’re thinking that the GT-R is really the only candidate for the R-HYBRID badge.

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What’s far less certain is when we would see a GT-R hybrid, assuming that’s what the badge was designed for, and that Nissan’s plans don’t change. The next-generation GT-R isn’t due until 2017 at the earliest—a car we know the brand is developing a hybrid powertrain for—but there’s little reason Nissan would have the graphic designers working up an emblem four years ahead of time. Given how much the current R35 GT-R has already evolved during its lifetime, we wouldn’t put it past Nissan’s engineers to be planning a hybrid system for the present car. Despite the cold sweats that the word “hybrid” evokes in so many car enthusiasts, a hybrid GT-R would be far, far removed from a Prius. Instead, think more along the lines of what Ferrari has done with the LaFerrari. If Fazza can get away with a hybrid hypercar, so can Nissan—it’s not like it’ll be named the something ridiculous, like LaNissan.

Source: CarAndDriver