With Queen Elizabeth II on bank notes and place names like Richmond and Surrey, the west coast of Canada is most emphatically a British Columbia.
Apart from the cars, of course, which are largely unlike any thing you will find in the UK. It’s primarily a land of American-style pick-up trucks and massive SUVs – but there are some Japanese interlopers that you won’t find in Britain. There’s a perfect premise, then, for us to gather the best of them atop a coastal ski hill.
From Toyota, there’s the GR Corolla, a sop thrown across the Pacific since North America doesn’t get the GR Yaris. Toyota has taken the three-pot buzz-bomb spirit of its homologation-special hatchback and infused it into a more practical four-door shape. We’ve called the bog-standard Corolla “pleasingly mischievous”, so how does nearly 300bhp and an adjustable central differential grab you?
From Subaru, Canadians are lucky enough to have both versions of the latest-generation WRX – what we once knew as the Impreza WRX. You might perhaps not recognise how the yobbo boy racer of the 1990s has matured into a family saloon with the disposition of a fluffy golden retriever. Yet the bonnet scoops and turbochargers are still here, and so is the World Rally Blue paint that evokes memories of Colin McRae and Richard Burns. Select either manual for maximum enthusiasm or CVT for daily-driver practicality and keep the brim of your baseball cap as flat as Saskatchewan.
Lastly, Nissan’s simply named Z heaves into view with the world-weariness of Toshiro Mifune’s wandering ronin in Yojimbo (a brilliant movie from 1961 – go check it out). Not entirely a new car but an ageing platform given a fresh body design and a twin-turbocharged V6 engine borrowed from Infiniti’s parts bin, this coupé is a little on the heavy side but still robust. And charismatic: Toyota asked BMW for help with the GR Supra but Nissan kept the Z’s development fully in-house, and it’s the better for it.
These aren’t direct competitors for your hard-earned pounds (well, dollars), but all promise thrills for keen drivers. So let’s see whether British enthusiasts would be within their rights to have a sour-grapes attitude to these forbidden fruits.
Nissan Z: The last samurai
We’re now three decades away from the golden age of Japanese bubble-economy manufacturing. The likes of the twin-turbocharged Mazda RX-7 and Mk4 Toyota Supra are now classics to be polished and enjoyed at the weekend. But the car that proved the Rising Sun’s performance bona fides is still here to stir up trouble.
While the Z is simply named, it’s not really the right name for it: it’s more a reborn 300ZX, right down to the vintage-look tail-lights. Where the 240Z sold in the thousands because it was scarcely more expensive than a compact saloon, this current Z is more a muscular alternative to a V8 Ford Mustang. It feels engineered to be sold to the same people who either bought a 240Z new or just missed out on doing so.
Nissan’s management planned to end its sports car line after the 370Z , but the Z was championed in-house by Hiroshi Tamura, chief product specialist for the GT-R and long-time Nismo executive. His argument was that a low-volume sports car was still necessary to satisfy Nissan’s pride, even if it wasn’t hugely profitable.
