Car obsessives with a keen eye can spot a high-performance model from a mile away. Sometimes, the differences are fairly obvious; the wing on an STI versus a normal Subaru WRX comes to mind. Other times, though, they’re more subtle. (I love hot hatchbacks, but even I have to squint to know if I’m looking at a VW Golf R or GTI at a glance.) But automakers are establishing a trend that makes it even easier to distinguish slow cars from fast ones: Brake caliper color.
Nissan has been doing this for a minute. On its most ordinary cars—think of the Rogue, Sentra, or dearly departed Altima—the brake calipers are painted silver. Even the base Z wears silver calipers. Step up to the Z Performance package, though, and you get red paint on the Akebono four-piston front and two-piston rear calipers. You’ll also find that shade on the Armada Nismo, a car that seems silly but is way better than it should be.
Then, the even sportier Nissan Z Nismo has bright red Akebono calipers. That car makes 420 horsepower, 20 hp more than the standard Z, and inherits two-piece iron-aluminum rotors from the R35 GT-R. Of course, it’s hard to communicate those differences from afar, but the distinguished caliper color helps.
If a Nissan has Brembo brakes, then it gets gold calipers. Remember the R34 GT-R? It had ’em from 1999 onwards. And so did the R35 when it landed in North America back in 2008. But the most extreme Nissans with carbon-ceramic brakes get yellow calipers, with the sole exception being the 2023 Z Proto Spec (it had yellow calipers but no carbon-ceramics).
It isn’t just Nissan, either. Rivian installs silver brake calipers on its dual-motor electric vehicles, while tri-motor variants get yellow. Top-of-the-line quad-motor models have blue brake calipers, and soon, so will the RAD performance variants.
I’m sure there are other brands doing it too.
Of course, there’s nothing stopping anyone from painting the calipers on their base model to pass as something more. I saw that on a Nissan once, except they painted the rotors, too. That… didn’t go well.
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