Mike Kojima posted on March 12, 2009 05:38
With Nissan claiming some awesome production power numbers for the 370Z, we decided to put the car through a dyno test to see if Nissan is able to back up their claims on actual production cars. Our test mules are both sport model 370Zs, bone stock from the dealer with just a few hundred break in miles. We tested a 7 speed automatic transmission model and a 6 speed manual to make things interesting.
We used the Superflow AutoDyn 30 chassis dyno at Technosquare Inc to conduct our test. The AutoDyn 30 is a dyno that is both inertial like the more common Dynojet but it also has an eddy current power absorber so it can load the engine more than a Dynojet to hopefully give more accurate results. The power absorber makes the AutoDyn 30 better for tuning but the dyno also gives lower, more conservative power results than the more industry standard Dynojet, so don’t be surprised if others post bigger number for their 370Zs.
For sake of consistency we tested both cars on the same day within minutes of each other applying the SAE standard correction factor to the results. We also ran each car for several minutes on the dyno before starting power runs to fully heat soak the engine compartment and to bring the drivetrain up to temperature to assure consistent results. We did several pulls on each car until the power numbers stabilized then allowed the car to run slowly on the dyno for around 10 minutes to cool down and then repeated the pulls to see if there were any changes after some hard runs. The charts we are presenting here were average runs, not high or low ones.
