It was widely reported that the giant killer Nissan GTR had some issues with regards to the durability of its transmission and Nissan’s willingness to honor warranty claims when the car’s electronics had been put in a specific configuration. That configuration happened to be the only way an owner could achieve the performance numbers like 0-60 and 1/4 mile times Nissan used to advertise the car.

This was a huge blow to the GTR’s credibility. What good is an $80,000 car that can outrun $200k supercars if it will break when used as advertised and the carmaker won’t stand behind it? Not much good, and Internet message boards erupted in hate for the GTR when the news of its fragility spread.

Nissan fixed the problem for its second model year by updating the computer and transmission, but customers who purchased the first run of GTRs thought these problems should never have come up on an $80,000 car and filed a lawsuit. According to Autoblog, as part of the settlement of that lawsuit, Nissan will upgrade all GTRs to the newer specifications for free. Nissan will also reset the warranty on any GTR to five years/60,000 miles when the upgrade is performed.

Now that Nissan has fixed the GTR’s launch control problems and is upgrading cars for free, will the GTR be recognized as a legitimate budget supercar? Or has its reputation been ruined by the problems with the first cars?