On 8 November, 1989, a new premium car brand was taking its first baby steps into the premium car market. Nissan wanted to take on the big shots of the premium car industry so they came up with the Infiniti brand. Designed from the start to take on the already established BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Jaguar, the world's latest luxury car brand didn't exactly caught on at first.
Curiously, the Infiniti brand was launched at around the same time as two other Asian premium manufacturers, namely Acura and Lexus, which came from Honda's and Toyota's stables. While Lexus got on with a great start and kept its momentum high enough for the two following decades, both Acura and Infiniti were somewhat left in the dust. Infiniti went on to follow a rather confusing way of marketing their models up until the early 2000s, when a spark of enlightenment hit the Japanese premium manufacturer.
Since sales were refusing to catch up with their German, British and even Japanese counterparts, Nissan took a peek at their competitors and finally settled their gun sight on BMW. So, from that time on, Infiniti marketing would only consist of furiously taking cheap shots at BMW. It didn't quite seem to work at first but after the whole car line-up was revamped to suit the new "Japanese Bimmer" philosophy sales began to pick up.
Today, the so-called Nissan FM platform underpins every single Infiniti model except for the humongous QX fulls-size SUV. Every model from the G line of sedans and coupes to the EX and FX crossover/SUVs shares the same FM modular architecture. The "FM" bit comes from the "front midship" location of the engine. In other words, almost every Infiniti engine's center of mass sits behind the front axle, therefore the cars' weight distribution is very close to 50:50 no matter if it's a G37 Coupe or an FX50 crossover/SUV.
Since the end of 2008, the Infiniti brand has also started its invasion of Europe. This is how we got the chance to drive what is probably their best-selling sedan – the G37. Available with a single engine option (but what an engine, some might say!), the G37 sedan managed to win some of us over, but some of its downsides kept it from scoring full marks in every one of our test drive chapters. Read on to find out more.
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