Most Spot of the Week winners are cars that are hard to find. This one is a car that, until recently, wasn't allowed to be there at all.
This week's spot is a 1999 Nissan Skyline (R34) GT-R, caught by @otobanfaresi in Los Angeles County, United States — a country Nissan never sold it in.
The car America wasn't allowed to have
The R34 GT-R was never federalised for the United States. No dealer sold one, and for two decades importing one was effectively impossible.
What changed is arithmetic. US law exempts vehicles 25 years old or more from federal safety and emissions compliance, counted from the month they were built. R34 GT-R production started in January 1999 — so the earliest cars only became legal to bring in during 2024.
That makes a silver 1999 GT-R on a Los Angeles street a very new sight. Three years ago this photograph would have been of a car that shouldn't have been there.
276 hp, officially
The RB26DETT is a 2.6-litre twin-turbo inline-six, and Nissan quoted it at 276 hp.
That number is a polite fiction. Through the Nineties, Japanese manufacturers observed a gentlemen's agreement not to advertise more than 280 PS, so almost every fast Japanese car of the era was quoted at exactly the ceiling regardless of what it actually made. The RB26 was built with far more headroom than its brochure suggested, which is a large part of why the tuning world adopted it so completely.
Four-wheel drive that thinks
The GT-R's defining trick was ATTESA E-TS Pro. In normal driving it sends everything to the rear wheels; the moment they start to slip it shifts torque forward, continuously, and it reads yaw as well as wheel speed.
Super-HICAS steered the rear wheels slightly to sharpen turn-in. And on the dash sat a multi-function display — developed with Nismo — showing turbo pressure, oil and water temperature and lateral g in real time. A factory telemetry screen, in 1999.
The last one to carry the name
The R34 was the final Skyline GT-R. When the car returned in 2007 as the R35, Nissan dropped "Skyline" from the name entirely.
The numbers
- Engine: 2.6-litre twin-turbo inline-six (RB26DETT)
- Power: 276 hp as quoted, understood to be more
- Layout: front engine, ATTESA E-TS Pro all-wheel drive, 6-speed manual
- Also: Super-HICAS four-wheel steering, Nismo multi-function display
- Built: 1999–2002, roughly 11,500 GT-Rs
- Value today: ~$120,000
- Country: Japan
Why it's worth logging
This is a LEGENDARY — 509 spots out of 5,688 have reached that tier. It's worth 350 points, and it pulled 56 fires, more than any other spot this week and eleven clear of second place.
The R34 GT-R is also newer to Carva than the car is to America. The first one was logged on 9 August, three weeks ago. There are seven now, found by seven different people — nobody has caught two.
Seen something worth the walk back? Open Carva, point, shoot — next week this could be your spot.