Car enthusiasts with a keen eye can spot a high-performance model from a mile away. Sometimes, the differences are quite obvious; The wing on an STI versus a normal Subaru WRX comes to mind. However, at other times, they are more subtle. (I love hot hatchbacks, but even I have to squint to know if I’m looking at a VW Golf R or a GTI at a glance.) But automakers are setting a trend that makes it even easier to distinguish slower cars from faster cars: brake caliper color.
Nissan has been doing this for a minute. On its most common cars – think the Rogue, Sentra, or the dearly departed Altima – the brake calipers are painted silver. Even the base Z wears silver calipers. However, step up to the Z Performance package and you get red paint on Akebono four-piston front and two-piston rear calipers. You’ll also find that shadow on the Armada Nismo, a car that looks silly but is much better than it should be.
Then again, even the sportier Nissan Z Nismo has bright red Akebono calipers. That car makes 420 horsepower, 20 hp more than the standard Z, and gets two-piece iron-aluminum rotors from the R35 GT-R. Of course, it’s hard to tell those differences from a distance, but the distinctive caliper color helps.
If the Nissan has Brembo brakes, it gets gold calipers. Remember the R34 GT-R? He had it since 1999. And so did the R35 when it landed in North America in 2008. But the most extreme Nissans with carbon-ceramic brakes get yellow calipers, the only exception being the 2023 Z Proto spec (it had yellow calipers but no carbon-ceramic).
It’s not just Nissan. Rivian sports silver brake calipers on its dual-motor electric vehicles, while the tri-motor variants are yellow. The top-of-the-line quad-motor model has blue brake calipers, and soon, there will be RAD performance variants as well.
I’m sure other brands are doing this too.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop someone from painting the calipers on their base model to make it look a little different. I saw it once on a Nissan, except they painted the rotors too. That… didn’t go well.
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