Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

We see some of the current BMW good and the bad in the styling. Roof down, it’s excellent, but when you press the button to put the roof up, it seems a slightly tipsy man comes and erects a tent with which he’s not completely familiar above your head. Why the vertical rear window? It looks stupid.

There’s more silliness, too, in the name. There was a time when the numbers on the back told you the model and the engine size. So a 325 was a 3-series with a 2.5-litre engine, and a 750 was a 7-series with a 5-litre engine. Very sensible. Very German. But now the logic has gone, so the 640 I was testing was a 6-series with a turbocharged 3-litre engine.

It’s a new power plant that develops many horsepowers and big wads of torque. And it’s allied to an eight-speed gearbox that is fitted solely so the man who invented it can go to gearbox conventions and tell other gearbox enthusiasts that his box has more cogs than theirs. It shifts well enough, but eight speeds? In a car with this much torque? As the XJS proved all those years ago, three is all you need.

And three would suit this car far more because it is the laziest machine I’ve driven since the old Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. It is not built for point-and-squirt hammer-time trips to the racetrack. Shock and awe? Lock and snore, more like. It even comes with a TV screen of such vastness, it’s unfair to call it a television. This is a home cinema.

This, then, is built to move you and your family, provided the children are both amputees, around in the greatest possible comfort. It is a car designed for Houston dentists. A fatboy car.

We should rejoice at the news. Too many expensive cars these days are ruined by low-profile tyres and ebony-hard suspension. Too many are honed on the Nürburgring. So, while they work on a track, where they will never be driven, they are bone-shakingly horrid on the road, where they will.

The BMW is soft. Squidgy. Comfy. The steering wheel is connected to the front wheels with a big soft bag full of melted chocolate, and the noise it makes at speed is the hum of a gardener who’s happy in his work.

I’m sure that if you were really determined, it could be made to whiz about at 155 mph in a fog of tyre smoke. But that would be like trying to make a teenager tidy its room. Possible but, ultimately, too much effort is required.

You don’t drive the 640. You waft along. It’s one of those cars that’s extremely happy to plod up the motorway at 65 mph, unless you aren’t concentrating, in which case it will slot some Barry White into the CD player and drop down to about 3 mph.

At the lights, the engine is so lazy that when you come to a halt it can’t even be bothered to keep going and falls asleep. The idea is that when you take your foot from the brake pedal it wakes up. And that sounds very green and polar-bear-friendly. But you wait till you’re trying to pull onto a fast and busy main road. It can be a bit hairy, spotting a gap and then thinking, Oh Christ. The engine’s nodded off.

Even the satnav is lazy. After you’ve given it the first four characters of a postcode, it can’t be bothered to listen any more and finds what it thinks is roughly the right road to nearly where you’re going. In some cars these days the satnav will suggest alternative routes to miss jams that lie ahead. Not the BMW. It can’t be bothered. It likes jams. It can have a nap.

I know a great many people who would absolutely love this car. People who have a few bob and want to park something a bit tasty on the drive, but who actually can’t abide driving and aren’t very good at it. The 640 would be perfect, because it isn’t really a car. It’s a bed.

When you climb into most BMWs, you feel as if you should be wearing racing bootees and a suit made from Nomex. In this one, the correct attire would be a pair of pyjamas.

Are you a serious car enthusiast? I mean, really serious? Do you drive round every corner as fast as the laws of physics will allow? Do you open the taps whenever you can to revel in the intoxicating, mesmerizing power of internal combustion? Does G-force tickle your G-spot? Do you talk about torque at parties? Are cars, for you, the light and the life and the meaning of everything? Right. Well why don’t you have a Nissan GT-R, then?

The GT-R is not designed to impress other people. There is no hand-stitched leather and no monogrammed luggage. It’s a Nissan, too – a Morphy Richards in a world where Dolce & Gabbana rules. Does it look good? No. Will it turn heads? No. But only because no one’s neck muscles can move that fast.

The GT-R is designed to examine carefully the scientific laws that govern movement and then systematically to break them. It is designed to go faster than you ever thought possible, possess more grip than is physically allowed, change gear more quickly than you can blink, and stop with such ferocity that you can actually feel your face coming off. No style. Just engineering.

It is made in a hermetically sealed factory, which is climatically controlled to ensure all the components are in the same state of thermal expansion when they go together. The tyres – this says a lot – are filled with nitrogen because the normal air used in humdrum cars such as Ferraris and Aston Martins is too unpredictable. It expands and contracts appreciably according to tyre temperature. Nitrogen does not.

Then you have the wheels. They are knurled to stop the tyres coming adrift during cornering. Does a Ferrari have that? No. It’s not necessary.

The new 2011 GT-R is built along exactly the same lines but now there’s more power, more grip, more downforce and even more speed. It’s still not designed to impress your passengers. It’s designed to hurt them.

Let’s begin with a standing-start full-bore acceleration run. You put the gearbox in race mode, and then you hold down the traction control button for a moment, put your left foot on the brake and mash your right foot into the carpet. When the revs have settled, and the 523-horsepower 3.8-litre twin-turbocharged engine is screaming its head off, you take your foot off the brake.

What happens next is extraordinary. There is no wheelspin. The clutch does not slip. One second you are stationary, and the next you are doing 100 mph. Imagine sitting in a deckchair in your garden on a summer’s day. It’s quiet and peaceful and you are enjoying the birdsong. Then you are hit from behind by a Boeing 747. That’s what the acceleration feels like in a GT-R. Absolutely unbefrigginglievable.

Of course, there are lightweight, low-riding track-day cars that, on paper, can get from 0 to 60 just as quickly. But they don’t get from 0 to 5 with anything like the savagery. And they run out of puff at 100. The GT-R does not. It just keeps on going, and when you get to the red line, you pull the paddle and instantly – not something that could be said of the previous model – the next gear is engaged. I have never experienced anything quite like it, if I’m honest. It’s wild. It’s relentless. It’s intoxicating. It’s amazing.

Certainly, you should never use the launch control in this car unless you are bracing your head against the headrest at the time. Because if you’re not, the whiplash could put you in hospital.

It’s the same story in the corners, where the steering wheel becomes nothing more than a handle to hold on to so as to prevent yourself from being flung out of the seat. I should like very much to see an X-ray photograph of someone’s heart when they are cornering a GT-R, because one thing’s for sure. The G-force is so severe, there’s no way it would be heart-shaped.

I was desperate after just a couple of laps of the Top Gear test track to turn off the traction control. This would let the car slide, which would a) be more fun and b) reduce the pressure on my neck. But it’s not wise to turn off the safety features, because if you spin a GT-R, you will break many complicated components.