Nissan’s Infiniti Packs a Punch as Luxury Car
The second wave of Japan’s soft reshaping of America’s luxury car market slides into Southern California next week.
First came the $35,000 Lexus LS400 by Toyota. In September, its maiden month, this high-performance smoothie in leather and maple outsold BMW in the United States. And 35% of its new owners had traded down from European luxury cars.
The response stunned even Toyota, in particular one company spokesman who only days earlier had made this cautious prediction in print: “We think it will be hard to win over BMW and Mercedes owners. But in the years ahead we will get them.”
Now comes the Infiniti Q45 by Nissan.
It goes on sale Wednesday.
If it does not seduce several thousand more Americans from their German and British thoroughbreds, blame it on a shortage of buyers in the marketplace, not on any shortcomings of the vehicle.
For if Rolls-Royce ever decides to build a smaller luxury car, it couldn’t do much better than slap a Grecian radiator on the Infiniti.
This car is that smooth. It infects its driver with elegance. It is yet another impressive example of miracles made by today’s automotive technologists who can subdue the roughest roads by multiple links in a suspension system, muffle the noisiest engines and their clattering innards, and convert momentum to inertia and back in a computer’s wink.
Yet the Toyota-Lexus also is such a car.
A representative for Nissan-Infiniti agreed.
“But what Infiniti has tried to accomplish, overall, is attention to detail,” he continued. “The shape of the switches and the sound they make. The feel and the look of the door handles and their invitation. The lack of a grill.
“The Infiniti buyer will be more discriminating, a person who wants to break out. They want an experience from the car, a handling relationship . . . they start the car, they hear the engine and they start to feel it.”
Those of us who pump our own gas may be excused for missing the point of such rhapsodizing over two tons of rubber, steel and annual registration fees. But when you’re a new entry in a world business competing against several nations and a hundred manufacturers offering similar products to jaded millions, it pays to develop a trick pitch.
Hence Infiniti’s curious advertising campaign, months of teasing by car commercials that didn’t show a car but did wax ethereal on the essences of life, nature and the spiritual legacy of Euell Gibbons.
So the biggest surprise of the Infiniti Q45 is that it doesn’t come covered with twigs and leaves with a koi in the glove box.
But the soul and commercial place of a vehicle is still best measured by the old standards of comfort of ride, oomph of engine, safety of brakes and steering and is it a car worth the price?
In these departments, quite clearly, the Infiniti is magna cum superb, a car of enormous prowess with a blessed feel not of a quick five-year development (which was its gestation period) but of decades of gentle evolution.
It is not better than its equivalent from Mercedes (the 420SEL) or BMW (the 735i). But it is as good. Do not look at Infiniti for the heritage and prestige of Jaguar. Maybe in a season or so.
Sticker Price
But now examine its sticker. At $38,000 (with four-wheel steering, a rear-deck spoiler and racier wheels the only options) the Q45 clearly is underselling the best that Europe can muster in its class. A car doesn’t get much more attractive than that.
Comparisons with the Lexus LS400--especially with two months between personal driving impressions--would not be fair.
Price and horsepower are about the same. Performance and amenities are identical. Lexus and Infiniti are front-engine, rear-drive cars and come hard-wired for a telephone and CD player. High-tolerance engineering, anti-lock brakes, speed-sensitive steering, driver-side air bag, climate control, a Bose sound system and insulation and exhaust tuning to allow the throaty reminder of V-8 power are with both.
There are, indeed, only subtle differences.
Lexus’ is admired as a luxury, high-performance car.
Infiniti likely will be regarded for high performance first, luxury second.
For Lexus’ interior is warm maple and cozier lines.
There isn’t a sliver of wood inside the Infiniti.
The line of its elliptical dash curves down to isolate the driver in a visual capsule. Even the leather seats feel chillier. The environment is quite impersonal and, ironically, there’s almost a Teutonic sterility here.
Ergonomically, the Q45 (there is an Infiniti M30 coupe that will list for $25,000) passes the toughest test of all. Don’t read the owner’s manual. Resist a systems briefing. Now, do all the knobs and switches have obvious functions? Can they be fully understood by nothing more than looking and a little common sense fiddling?
They certainly can. The Infiniti is delightfully self-explanatory.
Unfortunately, the exterior of the car is a classic of saying nothing. There is a line between discretion and dullness, between elegance and the elementary and the Infiniti crosses both on the wrong side. It is far from unattractive, but it turns few heads and is just . . . well, it is just there.
Then there is that hood motif. It looks like a lace coaster. Jay Leno sees it as a basket of snakes. In truth, it is a mythical Japanese plant.
But fire up the Infiniti. Hear its rumble. Ease into traffic and who cares that this car and its silly badge will never make any gallery of industrial design. For it will indeed make the day of any purist who believes that fine cars respond to a driver’s mien in addition to his throttle and steering input.
Tempting Power
The Infiniti has the overpowering punch to be first away and far in front at those freeway meters that allow one car per lane per green. The effort to stay docile in traffic must be conscious. The subconscious is continually urging a driver to take full advantage of a splendid meld of power and steering (why else would the engineers have put it there?) and make like a scalpel around less agile traffic.
Yet this is not a car for philistines. If crude speed is the lust, buy a motorcycle. If in search of the satisfaction of precise response and fingertip control of a car poised to correct our indecisions, even ham handling, consider a Q45.
And always there will be wonder at the Nissan-Infiniti talent that raided standard parts bins for ordinary pieces--disc brakes, coil springs, automatic transmission, rack and pinion steering--and massaged them into a tight, smooth, integrated package with no apparent separation of functions.
How talented?
Infiniti’s transmission is a four-speed automatic that, under standard loafer pressure, moves the car away in second gear for slower but smoother starts. But if you want to get theatrical, simply floor the pedal from rest and the transmission kicks down to first and away we go with greater flair.
How crafty does that make Infiniti?
Well, it borrowed that particular development from Mercedes.
