2009 Infiniti Qx56 Pearl White Light Front End Damage !!look!! on 2040-cars

Auto blog

2017 Infiniti Q30 First Drive

Audi and BMW have owned the premium C-segment for almost a decade now thanks to the A3 and the 1 Series (and 2 Series). Benz's A-Class has become less of a retiree's option and has spawned a popular (if not particularly good) sedan (the CLA) and a crossover (GLA). Down in the lower-class decks, machinery from Subaru is punching well above its weight, while Volkswagen's Golf owns the market in Europe. This all left perennial premium pretenders like Lexus and Infiniti with a problem: how to convince buyers their C-segment machinery was genuinely premium if they were based off a volume-selling donor body from Toyota or Nissan? Mercedes-Benz opened an odd window of opportunity for Infiniti. See, Benz's parent, Daimler, and Infiniti's motherships, Renault and Nissan, have had a technical alliance since 2010. A big technical alliance. So Infiniti was able to develop its hatch to sit atop the A-Class chassis, powertrain, and suspension architecture, though you'd barely know it by looking at the Infiniti from the outside. It has a style all its own, and you're not going to mistake a single angle on the Q30 for anything that comes out of Stuttgart. Nobody makes deeper cuts and curves into its metal than Infiniti. The Japanese brand claims that design is at its core, and whether you love or hate that design, it's hard to argue that point. The Q30 feels like a nicer, easier, more luxurious place than the A-Class on which its based. "Infiniti design is very three-dimensional on every panel. We want to give the sense and the feeling that every Infiniti has been made by an artisan, by hand, not by computer," the company's London-based design boss, Simon Cox, argued. Some will love it, some will hate it, and Infiniti can live with it either way. The point is that the brand is now on the field in a segment that is projected to keep growing at more than 9.4 percent globally, and it got there at a fraction of the normal cost of an all-new car, without having any easily identifiable cap tips to the Benz's far more conservative exterior design. The Benz bits are more obvious inside. Infiniti did such a good job of grafting its design ideas onto the interior hard points that it feels like a nicer, easier, more luxurious place than the A-Class, even if the Benz will be between eight and 10 percent more expensive in most markets. The dash top is clean, swooping, and stitched together beautifully.

Infiniti G37 to live on in showrooms alongside 2014 Q50

Infiniti is preparing to roll out its hotly anticipated 2014 Q50, a car that not only ushers in a new alphanumeric naming strategy, it ostensibly replaces the G37 as the brand's bread-and-butter sport sedan. That will happen, but not in the short-term, as the G37 will continue to be manufactured and sold alongside the Q50, at least for the rest of this year.
Infiniti spokesman Kyle Bazemore has confirmed to Autoblog that a decision is pending on how long to extend the G37 sedan's production run. "We're taking Q50 up a little bit, and that allows us to keep the G Sedan in the lineup... It [Q50] certainly started as a replacement, but it ended up being much more than that." Confusingly, Infiniti has already announced that the Q50 is to start at $37,605 (including $905 destination charge), yet the 2013 G37 is more expensive, starting at $38,255 delivered according to Infiniti's consumer website. Thus, a price drop on the G37 is likely coming in short order.
So why hold on to the older model? With the Q50 launching exclusively with V6 and Hybrid models (a turbo four and diesel are said to be in the cards down the road), Infiniti evidently feels it is risking leaving lower-end sales on the table. "There's a lot of movement with the [BMW] 320i and such, and this allows us a two-tier strategy to compete," says Bazemore. Keeping the G37 on tap at a lower price for fleet sale duty may also serve to protect the Q50 as it establishes itself on the market.

Race Recap: Abu Dhabi GP is reversals, luck, leanness and last dances

We weren't sure if Alter Ego Nico Rosberg, the one who flew into Brazil and showed Mercedes AMG Petronas teammate Lewis Hamilton that he knew also knew how to grab an entire race weekend by the scruff of the neck, arrived in Abu Dhabi. In both Friday practice sessions Hamilton showed Rosberg the way. Then on Saturday, Alter Ego Rosberg took over, taking the last Free Practice session and then pole position by a whopping four-tenths of a second over Hamilton. Thanks to the gimmicky and soon-to-be-obliterated spectre of double points, if Rosberg won the race and Hamilton finished lower than second, the World Championship would remain in German hands. Behind Hamilton came the Williams duo, again, with Valtteri Bottas ahead of Felipe Massa. Daniil Kvyat did swell to put his Toro Rosso in fifth, Jenson Button was just as swell getting his McLaren into sixth. Kimi Raikkonen outqualified his Ferrari teammate Fernando Alonso for the third time this year, the pair taking seventh and eighth on the grid. Kevin Magnussen lined the second McLaren up in ninth, Jean-Eric Vergne making the top ten for Toro Rosso in his last race for the team. To be clear, that was the final grid for race: Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel had both qualified in the top ten but were sent to the back of the grid when their Infiniti Red Bull Racing front wings were deemed illegal. They'd start from the pit lane, which was still ahead of Romain Grosjean in the Lotus, who took so many penalties for new engine components that he started the race in Turkey. At lights-out on Sunday, well, it was pretty much lights out. That's when Hamilton got the start of the year, bolting off the line so quickly it didn't take him 100 meters to get in front of Rosberg. The Brit took Turn 1 in the lead, then laid more than a second into the German on the first lap. Rosberg kept close, about 2.5 seconds back, but it was Hamilton's race to lose and everyone knew it; barring a reliability issue or the kind of driving mistake Hamilton hasn't made all year, Britain would have its fourth double world champion. Rosberg was left asking his engineer what kind of strategy they might use to claim first place. That reliability issue did come, but it struck Rosberg on Lap 26 when his entire Energy Recovery System failed, robbing him of 160 horsepower and taxing his brakes.