The Infiniti Q50 looks like a car you’d find in an official motorcade, carrying the second-least important person: heavy but not bullet-proof, elegant but not wallet-busting. It’s a Japanese marque, a couple of decades old but available in Europe only since 2008. It has an isolated feel, as if it were developed away from all the other cars, which can make it seem yesteryear-y. The curvy front and determined heft belong to a pre-agile driving era. Even creating a name by misspelling a perfectly good word seems a 1990s thing to do. And yet sometimes the little idiosyncratic touches play in its favour: everything’s automatic – headlights, wipers, overhead parking camera, the slightly patronising way the seat hums towards and away from the steering wheel, in anticipation of my next move. It got to the point that, when Magic FM came on, I assumed the Q50 knew I was in the mood for Tracy Chapman.
It has show-off economy features – a stop-start engine for when you’re stationary – but is not structurally economical: some pointy-head has calculated that it’s 24p dearer per mile than an equivalent Bimmer, a sum so painful that, once you knew it, you’d visualise on every journey [see footnote]. So, on that basis alone, it fails its own challenge, which is to lure people from cars they know better with some magic combination of instant dependability and enticing newness. There’s going to be no brand exodus away from similar motors in the 40k bracket.
Having established that I’ll never be called upon to buy one, I started to enjoy it. At low speeds, it can feel a bit dieselly and reluctant, but it cuts up from 30 to 70 with so much enthusiasm, it felt like g-force. Something about that power, and the driving position, gave me a zen-like sense that I was inhabiting the spirit of the car, driving it forwards by force of mind. What’s 24p to a person who has reached a state of telepathy with a car? It also has an indefinable road presence, partly because it is unfamiliar, so it takes more than an instant for people to figure out how expensive it must be; and partly because, being rather broad, it’s zippier than it looks. People spin round as you pass, with a look as if they’ve just been overtaken by a fat cyclist.
There are some classy dashboard features, too: a touchscreen large enough to watch a film on (variously occupied by the satnav and the stereo), and a stop-start button instead of a key insert. I found this counter-intuitive, like changing a cashpoint so the money comes out before the card. Naturally, people will adapt, but a lot of people will forget their cards in the meantime, and I forgot to turn off the engine (but only once). I was not expecting that I’d sink into the seat and it would smell like James Bond, all high-quality fibres and Acqua di Parma, but it did feel a bit plasticky. That said, I was impressed by how well it all stacked together, the way it was one step ahead of me at every turn, clocking light drizzle, ready with an ambient temperature, full of seven-gear automatic confidence. I watched it leave with some regret, largely because I can’t see myself meeting one again.
Infiniti Q50 2.0T Sport Automatic
Price From £34,125
Top speed 152mph
Combined fuel consumption 43.5mpg
Acceleration 0-62mph in 7.2 seconds
CO2 emissions 151g/km
Eco rating 7/10
Cool rating 2/10
Follow Zoe on Twitter.
• This footnote was added on 1 March 2015. The running costs given in this article relate to a previous model of the Infiniti Q50, not the one tested. This model’s performance is on a par with similar models in the same class from other manufacturers.
