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Yet they feel very different, these cars. The GT-R may have shed the name, but traces of the Skyline genealogy remain. This is a big, imposing vehicle. It weighs 1,740kg, despite being made partly of aluminium and using carbon fibre in its under-body aero.

The doors are long and take effort to open. You sit high inside, and before you've even fired it up - via the red starter button - the GT-R communicates solidity. You can feel it in the rim of the steering wheel, in the interior controls. It's not messing. Frankly, it feels like a truck.

The R8 isn't messing either, but has a more traditional performance-car mien: lower, wider, space-age in a Gerry Anderson kind of way. But surprisingly spacious too. It's 200kg lighter than the Nissan, and again, in the absence of a set of industrial scales to verify things, communicates its weight through all the bits you touch on the way in. Doors, seats, wheel, controls: all have a delicacy the Nissan doesn't. Some also have a flimsiness the Nissan doesn't, which is most unusual for an Audi. But then this is a most unusual Audi.

Then there's the way they look. Bar the Alfa Romeo 8C or Aston Vantage, it seems car designers have comprehensively forgotten how to design beautiful cars. Neither the Nissan nor the Audi advance the pure art of the car one iota, though for completely different reasons.

Debate has raged all year in the Top Gear office about the R8's appearance, and there's still no consensus. I rather like it, and it turns heads like nothing else new in 2007, but there's a lingering sense that it's trying just too hard. Which is never cool.

There's no doubt that LEDs are changing contemporary head and tail-light graphics, but the Audi has 210 of the buggers and lights up at night with all the subtlety of a Soho sex shop. Still, not bad at all for your first stab at a supercar.

The GT-R's visuals are almost as promiscuous. On the face of it, about as aerodynamic-looking as the British Library, the Nissan actually cleaves the air with a hugely impressive coefficient of 0.27.

On closer inspection, this car - like the Ferrari Enzo - owes every slash, duct and crease to the ministrations of the wind tunnel. (The best bit is the kink on the C-pillar, which steers air towards the rear wing.) On which basis, it starts to look pretty good - menacing, machined and macho, with strong graphics and a cleverly tapered glass-house (just pretend you've never clapped eyes on a Ferrari 250GT, OK?).

It's also a car you can simply get into and drive. This is important: as chief engineer Kazutoshi Mizuno recently told TG, "Building a 192mph car is not a particularly difficult challenge. The challenge is to build a car that is stable, quiet, comfortable and easy to drive at that speed." Earlier last year, it looked like Audi had nailed the 'everyday' supercar thing with the R8. Now here comes Nissan making even bigger noises about its automotive alchemy.

And there's nowhere better to test ease-of-use than Tokyo after dark. If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Tokyo is rivalling London as the city that never seems to finish its bloody roadworks. Man, this place is busy. A dazzling network of elevated dual carriageways criss-crosses the metropolis like a giant concrete spider's web, but as we leave Ginza, we're immediately stuck fast in a gluey stream of traffic.

At midnight. Gran Turismo creator Polyphony devised the GT-R's 19-screen multi-function display, and while its main purpose is to record lap times, lateral g and telemetry traces, it's also good for twiddling with in a jam.