2003 Infiniti Qx4 Base Sport Utility 4-door 3.5l Luxury Suv on 2040-cars

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800k car names trademarked globally, suddenly alphanumerics seem reasonable

What's in a name? This cliched phrase probably gets tossed out at every marketing meeting that happens when a new car gets its nomenclature. We know the answer, though: everything. The name of a car has all the potential to make or break it with fickle customers that are more conscious than ever about what their purchases say about them.
That's giving headaches to marketing folks across the automotive industry. "It's tough. In 1985 there were about 75,000 names trademarked in the automotive space. Today there are 800,000," Chevrolet's head of marketing, Russ Clark, told Automotive News. Infiniti's president, Johan de Nysschen, echoed Clark's sentiment, saying, "The truth of the matter is, across the world, there is hardly a name or a letter that hasn't already been claimed by one car manufacturer or another. You can go through the alphabet - A, B, C and so forth - and you will quickly see that almost all available letters are taken."
What has that left automakers to do? Get creative. In the case of Infiniti, it made the controversial move to bring all of its cars' names into a new scheme, classifying them as Q#0 for cars and QX#0 for SUVs and crossovers. So the Infiniti G, which was available as the G25 and G37, is now the Q50. The FX37 and FX50 are now the QX70.

Infiniti confirms new "premium compact" to be built in UK

Aside from certain naming-related news, Infiniti has actually had some decent product news to announce this week. The company's president, Johan de Nysschen, alluded to a new 550-horsepower performance sedan, and now the automaker has confirmed that a new "premium compact" will go into production in 2015. Based on the fact that this new model will be built alongside the Nissan Leaf at the automaker's Sunderland, UK assembly plant, we could only hope that it's a production version of the LE Concept (shown above).
Sunderland already produces Nissan products like the Qashqai, Juke and Note, and as a part of an investment of 250 million British pounds (around $406 million USD) for the new model, the plant would add an extra 280 jobs with the capacity to build 60,000 of the new Infinitis annually. Adding the premium compact at Sunderland means that Infiniti will have to change its plans for another new model, a bigger "C-segment hatchback," which could very well be a production version of the Etherea Concept.

Nissan bringing Infiniti brand to Japanese market

Ever hear that the best stuff is saved for export? Just ask Japanese luxury car buyers. It's been decades since Japan's largest automakers set out to take on Europe's finest with dedicated luxury brands of their own, but they have kept those brands largely out of their own domestic market and sold them almost exclusively overseas. But that's beginning to change.
In 2005 Toyota launched the Lexus brand - which it had been exporting since 1989 - in Japan. Honda reportedly planned on bringing its Acura brand to its home market just a few years later, but ended up delaying the move. Now Nissan is reportedly preparing to launch the Infiniti lineup in its own backyard.
This according to a report published in the Japanese business daily Nikkei and now making the rounds of the English-language press. The plan apparently involves offering at least part of the Infiniti model line in domestic Nissan dealers, holding off for the time being on launching a separate dealer network in Japan.