Nissan GTR coupe

It's been nearly two years since the GT-R launched in Japan and America. That's nearly two years of multiple award wins, glowing press in every medium all over the world, destruction of all rivals in group tests everywhere and incredible lap times around the Nurburgring. The racing version even blitzed its opposition in the Japanese GT series.

If you'd decided you wanted one when the car was first revealed, and laid down a deposit back then, you've been waiting a l-o-n-g time, eating furniture with the anticipation.

Now Godzilla is finally on sale in the UK, for £56,800. And the car you see on this page is the 2010 model, upgraded a bit from the original Japanese/US 2009 spec. We'll get to that in a minute. First, it's important to note that the very early cars were not fitted with satnav. Desperate people, chewing on the legs of dining tables, were prepared to do desperate things to get their new GT-Rs, so in April Nissan imported some early 2010 cars without nav. And if you have an early car, you can't retro-fit nav because this whole nav/telemetry unit is closely integrated with the entire car's system. That didn't matter to the people with bits of lounge suite trim hanging from their mouths. But order one now and it gets the nav.

What is different to the early Jap/Yank 2009 cars? Not a lot. Some minor tweaks to suspension bushings and tuning, darker-coloured wheels and a very small hike in power, from 473bhp to 478bhp. Torque is the same at a useful 433lb ft. There are three trim levels: standard, premium and black. The premium is £58,100 and gives you a nice Bose sound system and automatic headlights. Black gives those plus the black alloys and special black trim with red stitching: £59,400.

This car is the greatest performance bargain of this or any other century, and is one of the most incredible cars of any kind ever built. For the price of a BMW M3, you have a four-wheel-drive, super-high-tech, all-weather, 195mph supercar with tremendous ability on all roads and an almost impossibly cool image. And a boot. New owners will be loading those boots with saliva-drenched chunks of furniture and taking them to the dump as we speak. Lucky sods.