The conventional wisdom about Nissan’s VQ engine is that the greater the displacement, the less appealing the sound of it: a Car and Driver scribe once asserted that the 3.7-liter version buzzes “like a blender set to ‘frappé’.” (The 3.0 version bolted into my car doesn’t sound bad at all.) Still, even if they stroked and bored it into the 4-plus range, it’s hard to imagine it making noises like this:

And then there’s the latest Merc’ Hammer. Yes it now has enough torque to strangle a humpback-whale, but at what cost? Even at idle, the old 6.2L engine burbles like the borborygmi of Cthulhu, and when prodded with a violent downshift barks like a stabbed Allosaur.

Try that with your fart-canned Civic.

Datsun is back! Well, sort of:

Nissan Motor Co’s revived Datsun brand will target increasing sales in Indonesia, India and Russia, the firm’s chief executive told reporters on Tuesday.

“It’s a green car, affordable car, small displacement, high local content,” [Carlos] Ghosn said of the Datsun. “It’s going to be a generous car.”

What it’s not going to be is an American car; there are apparently no plans to offer anything branded Datsun in the states.

Still, it gives me an opportunity to step up the Mr Humble game. In the past, people who seemed impressed for some reason that I drive an Infiniti would be told that “Oh, it’s just a Nissan.” Now I can give them “Oh, it’s just a Datsun.”

Contemporary cars have a panoply of warning lights, some pretty standard, some model-specific. My first Mazda 626, for instance, had a warning light to tell you if one of the exterior lights was burned out; this was apparently decontented away in the next generation. One I’ve never seen, though, was Nissan’s FLOOR TEMP warning, which is explained thusly:

The thing that really put the malaise into the Malaise Era was the inability of the automotive industry to meet US federal and (in the case of cars sold in California) state exhaust-emission regulations without crippling the vehicles (whether this inability was due to Naderite anti-progress bomb-throwers infesting the government or corporate mismanagement and the over-reliance on lobbying to fend off emissions regulations is your subject to debate). While Honda’s CVCC engines managed to beat the tailpipe test without the use of the early, incredibly inefficient catalytic converters, just about everybody else had to bolt a super-restrictive and surface-of-sun-temperature cat onto the exhaust. On low, sporty vehicles that didn’t have a good location for the catalytic converter, an overheating cat could set the car’s interior on fire. Nissan’s solution to this was the FLOOR TEMP indicator light, which used a temperature sensor near the catalytic converter to warn the driver to slow the hell down.

My primary Malaise Era ride was a ’75 Toyota Celica, which, in 49-state mode, lacked a cat altogether. (Despite the absence of the oft-derided device, minor tweaking of the rudimentary engine controls enabled this car to pass — barely — California emissions in 1988.) There was a lamp on the dash labeled EXH. TEMP, which I assume would have served the same purpose; I never saw it glowing.

The Italians, apparently, took a more direct approach:

Fiats, Ferraris, and (I’m pretty sure) Alfa Romeos of the late 1970s got this lovely and equally confusing “SLOW DOWN” idiot light to warn drivers of overheating catalytic converters; at least this light gave the driver some idea of the remedy for the problem. Some Fiats and British Leyland cars got a similarly cryptic (yet technically more accurate) “CATALYST” idiot light. Perhaps a really big idiot light reading “CATALYTIC CONVERTER OVERHEATING — SLOW YOUR ASS DOWN OR PERISH IN FLAMES!” would have been best.

They couldn’t do something like that today; why, that message is just as long as one of those wicked text messages and would thereby almost certainly constitute Deadly Distraction.

While we’re all cursing the ever-increasing price of gasoline, Bertel Schmitt has snagged a picture of what he describes as “Leaf’s Grandfather”: tucked away in a corner of Nissan’s Tech Center is a pure-electric vehicle, circa 1950.

It is not technically a Nissan; the Tama Electric Car Company, which built this nifty, if slow, box, was formed from the remains of the Tachikawa Aircraft Company, which (surprise!) got out of the aircraft business after 1945. Tama eventually became Prince Motor Company; Nissan bought it in 1966. (Nissan fanboys will perhaps be shocked to hear that the fabled Skyline was originally a Prince product.) Schmitt quotes the following numbers: cruising range, 96.3 km (almost 60 miles), top speed 35.2 km/hr (22 mph). You could probably get more than 60 miles out of the current Nissan Leaf if you kept the speed down.

Still undetermined, at least by me: if Tama was named for IJN Tama, a Kuma-class light cruiser sunk by the US Navy in 1944.

Sometimes it’s the little throwaway paragraphs that tell you the most. TTAC pounced on this one:

Renault-Nissan announced today in Detroit that its Decherd, Tenn., plant will build Mercedes-Benz 4-cylinder engines for Infiniti and Mercedes-Benz starting in 2014.

I’m not quite sure which is the more startling news: that Daimler is outsourcing engine production to the States — yes, they build Benzes in America, but we’re talking mostly the M-Class, which hardly seems suited to a four-banger — or that Infiniti, which hasn’t had a four in a car since the demise of the G20 a decade ago, has decided that they need one.

Deep speculation: Mercedes, for CAFE reasons, may want to bring the B-Class to the States for the first time. The current B-Class is offered with an optional CVT; your current go-to guys for CVT-related technology are Nissan and Audi, and Daimler would rather suck smart cars through a straw than buy anything from the VW Group. So when this new four comes out of Decherd, the engines bound for Benzland will be fitted with the appropriate hardware for a CVT, which might even be one of Nissan Jatco’s.

As for Infiniti, they presumably don’t need a four in the G: they’ve already conjured up an entry-level G25 with a small V6. The question then becomes “What would BMW do?” The Bavarians have already shown the way: they’ve brought out a 1-series just below the 3, and are reported to be working on a small FWD car. Besides the Mini, I mean. Since the Nissan Bluebird/Sylphy is about due for a rework … but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Nissan sales are booming — in the last decade they’ve boosted their US market share from about four percent to twice that — yet they get no press to speak of, and their product line ranges from ancient (Sentra) to anodyne (Altima) to alarming (Murano CrossCabrio). TTAC’s Edward Niedermeyer brought up the “ancient” issue with a Nissan official, and got this as a response:

Nissan’s VP for Communications David Reuter told us that this fact was what made him so optimistic about Nissan’s future. If sales are doing this well with product this old, he wondered aloud, what might happen if … say, models representing 75% of Nissan’s sales volume were replaced in a two-year span? He admitted that one of the brand’s biggest issues was breaking through the Honda-Toyota monopoly on media perceptions of Japanese automakers, and he suggested that a new product blitz was the only way to really accomplish that. I was reminded of the current darling of the mass-market brands, Hyundai, which grew sales steadily with aging and stolid but value-laden products, before replacing its entire lineup with eye-catching new models. Could a fresh batch of new designs do the same for Nissan?

Hard to say for sure. The funky little Cube isn’t selling all that well, but the far-funkier and no-less-little Juke is making bank. And the new Versa, unapologetically cheap, is scoring well with people who’d otherwise be buying a three-year-old Civic but live in constant fear of timing belts, a market far larger than I’d ever realized.

I think one thing holding the Hamburger back is its obsession with CVTs: even the Maxima, the ostensible “four-door sports car,” is saddled with one of these contraptions, and once you’ve seen the tach sitting at 4800 the entire time you’ve been climbing the onramp, you don’t particularly want to see it again. If they’re going to ask just-under-Infiniti money for this thing, they might as well bolt in Infiniti’s seven-speed auto and be done with it.

And I think the Frontier pickup, like every other pickup in the market, has been bloated beyond recognition. Were it not for that damned chicken tax, they could bring in a nice small truck, the kind that made their name in the States.

Except, of course, that their name at the time was “Datsun.”

You want to complain, complain on Facebook:

“Based on what I’ve seen in 90 days, I can realize that this is something we are going to have to deal with in the future. As opposed to operators or help desks just waiting for a customer to complain, we need to have a Facebook presence to solve issues before they get bigger, and take a more proactive role in identifying consumer issues or question.”

So saith Erich Marx, director of Marketing Communications for Nissan North America, who apparently has a staff of 15 who do nothing but watch social media all day and/or all of the night.

I have my doubts. I do read the Infiniti page on Facebook, and it’s largely filled with concept-car teases and low-level market research; I can’t see bringing them into the picture if I’m stuck by the side of the road. (Then again, I’m not above sending off a tweet if I have a bar’s worth of cell service.)

One of the motivations for scheduling Gwendolyn’s spa day(s) was the seeming inability of the A/C to deal with 100-degree days on anything resembling a consistent basis. As it turned out, the A/C was in decent shape, but one of the engine-cooling fans was hors de combat, which doesn’t make life any easier for the compressor.

I should probably quit whining about it, though, given the plight of this fellow:

I brought a new car — Nissan Sunny — if the outside temperature reaches 45 deg centigrade, A/C not working, compressor trips. How to solve? any technical answer?

Before you ask: 45°C is 113°F. And oh, yes, he lives in Qatar.

Then again, he’d pretty much have to say that, wouldn’t he?

[H]ow can one get in contact with an expert who can roll back the odometer on a 2010 or 2011 Nissan Pathfinder (digital odometer) and not get caught when the lease is up? Is there an instrument/procedure that one can use in order to change the display on the digital odometer such that the odometer reflects less than 39,000 miles when the vehicle’s lease has expired?

Please discuss this procedure or if you feel more comfortable, send me a private note describing this procedure and how to find a local expert who would be capable and willing to do this for a fee and it’s critical that this modification NOT be recognizable to the parties involved when returning the leased vehicle.

Thank you, in advance, for providing me with such helpful educational material that IN NO WAY would be used for illegal purposes nor fraud of any sort.

I need to boil this down to a metalaw, or at least a metacorollary, to supplement the existing wisdom: “When the first thing they tell you is ‘We are a legitimate business,’ run like hell.”

The Debbie Wasserman Schultz drive-American debacle generated all manner of tweetage, and a quip from the Instant Man:

Even worse, it’s a Japanese car that, though it’s built in America, is built in a right-to-work state!

This is a slight misquote of Moe Lane, who actually said this:

Seriously, Debbie? If you’re going to fulminate about Republican Presidential candidates driving foreign cars, don’t own a Nissan, OK? Particularly since the only places where they’re made in the USA are in right-to-work states.

Lane is quite correct here. Schultz’s Infiniti FX35 sport-utility, however, was assembled in Nissan’s Tochigi plant; the only Infiniti ever built in the US was the first-generation QX56, which was spun off Nissan’s Armada and built alongside it in Canton, Mississippi. (The current QX56 is a vaguely-Americanized Nissan Patrol, built in Kyushu.) Some lower-end Nissans are actually assembled in Mexico.

I’ve actually owned Japanese cars made in the US — by UAW members, yet! — but creatures of that ancestry are few and far between.

Wending its way through the Massachusetts General Court — it’s passed the Senate, and is awaiting consideration in the House — is a so-called “right to repair” bill, at the heart of which is this:

The manufacturer of a motor vehicle sold in the Commonwealth shall make available for purchase to independent motor vehicle repair facilities and motor vehicle owners in a non­-discriminatory basis and cost as compared to the terms and costs charged to an authorized dealer or authorized motor vehicle repair facility all diagnostic, service and repair information that the manufacturer makes available to its authorized dealers and authorized motor vehicle repair facilities in the same form and the same manner as it is made available to authorized dealers or an authorized motor vehicle repair facility of the motor vehicle.

This does not sit well with the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers:

They argue the real reason for the law is for parts manufacturers to get access to confidential company information to remanufacture original equipment and make cheaper versions.

“Our unlikely coalition of law enforcement organizations, Massachusetts business groups, labor unions, auto dealers, automakers and, most importantly, independent repairers recognizes that consumers already have the right to have their vehicle serviced by the repairer of their choice,” said Charles Territo, a spokesman for the Alliance. “This legislation is, was and will always be about parts not repair.”

Then again, how hard is it to walk into O’Reilly or AutoZone or even Pep Boys and come away with a knockoff version of an OEM part? Auto components have been reverse-engineered since about ten minutes after they were first engineered.

And what can’t I get? Nissan won’t sell me the CONSULT system used by dealerships — I can find a used one on eBay, though software updates are out of the question — but I can get all the repair information I can stand for $17 a year. Of the major makes, only BMW isn’t allowing this sort of thing; at the other extreme, Hyundai owners can get this stuff free.

So I’m not sure what I should think about this bill. It seems to me that if the manufacturers were really sweating the idea of cheap Chinese parts, they might, oh, refrain from teaming up with Chinese automakers who might copy their technology. Fat chance of that. That leaves the psychological angle: so long as the public suspects there may be some compelling reason to go back to the dealership rather than entrust Ol’ Betsy to the neighborhood garage, that particular cash cow will remain mostly unbutchered.

Well, okay, not yet they aren’t. But they’re up to something with that new electric car of theirs:

“From now on, we will market cars based on the value of the information they provide,” said Toru Futami, expert leader at Nissan’s IT & ITS engineering department to the Nikkei.

Details are as shady as the exact location of the data center. The Nikkei could divine that “by connecting the facility and its cars through a high-speed wireless network, Nissan is able to receive driving information in real time. The system enables the driver to easily get information about such things as traffic jams and the location of charging stations.” Hmm. Big deal. Here’s another one:

“Because the data center stores a vast amount of information, including the number of times the car battery has been recharged, drivers will be able to calculate such things as how many more years a battery can be used and what value to place on it when the car is resold.”

Then again, what you really want to know about a used car you’re considering is something they’re not mentioning: whether the previous owner engaged in wholesale hoonage. It seems to me that it wouldn’t be any more difficult to track zero-to-sixty-to-whatever bursts than battery charge cycles.

And I suspect it wouldn’t require rocket science to divert this information to, um, interested third parties.

Yutaka Katayama, who put Nissan on the American map fifty years ago as the first head of US operations, turned 100 this week, and, reports the Autoextremist, there are things he’d like to be doing differently these days:

Mr. K knocked the current 370Z in [an Automotive News] interview, saying, “First, it’s very heavy, and it’s also very expensive. I’d like to have a sports car like the Miata. The Miata is taking the place of the 240Z.”

On dealers: “Mr. [Carlos] Ghosn thinks he is making a car to make money. I was making an efficient car that can still earn money but also had the dealers in mind,” Katayama says. “You dealers are the first customers. So first you make the money. Then I can earn the money from you.”

Oh, and one more thing? Mr. K wants the Datsun name put back on the cars sold here in the U.S.

I could go for that, if they brought back something like the 240SX.

A woman posted a question this past weekend to Yahoo! Answers: “Whats working as an ESCORT like?”

Evidently the default category for questions about Escorts is “Ford.”

Addendum: It gets better. Try this one: “Can you find the local maxima and minima of these problems?”

Which fell under “Nissan.” (And if Nissan ever brings over a car smaller than the Versa — the Cube doesn’t count — I wonder if they’d have the temerity to call it “Minima”?)

One of TTAC’s Best and Brightest contemplates one aspect of a new Buick:

I do worry a bit about the base 3.0L V6 going in the new Lacrosse.

It makes 255hp, but only squeezes out 217 ft-lbs of torque. That is really low for this class. Add to that, it has a sky-high 6900RPM redline. I don’t know if people coming out of 3800s, ES350s, Azeras, and MKZs are going to like the performance characteristics of the 3.0L.

My nine-year-old car is powered by Nissan’s VQ30DE-K, which is, yes, a 3.0-liter V6. It makes 227 hp, but only squeezes out 217 lb-ft of torque. At the time, it was “the most powerful engine in its class,” according to Infiniti’s advertising. (Redline is 6600 rpm.)

So in a decade, the hot rod becomes the also-ran. Now that’s progress. Maybe.

Automakers are suffering because they can’t sell any cars; auto dealers are suffering because, well, they can’t sell any cars. Dealers, however, have alternative revenue streams, which the manufacturers will help them tap. Witness this mailing:

As a loyal customer, we know you are passionate about maintaining your vehicle with Infiniti expert service.

To thank you for your commitment, we are offering you a $50 rebate on your next Infiniti service visit.

And there’s a simulated $50 bill tucked into the fold.

There’s just one issue for me: I don’t happen to need $50 worth of service right this minute. (At 116,250 miles, the next service interval, it’s time for an oil change, and that’s it; the tab doesn’t approach $50.) The sensible thing to do, therefore, would be to hold it for the hyperexpensive 120k service, but that’s not happening before the end-of-March deadline.

Here’s what’s on the 120k Premium Maintenance list:

• Replace engine oil and filter
• Lubricate all locks/hinges
• Replace automatic transmission fluid
• Replace climate-controlled seat filter (M45/M35/Q45, if so equipped)
• Replace differential oil
• Replace engine air filter
• Replace engine coolant/flush system
• Replace engine drive belts
• Replace in-cabin microfilter
• Replace manual transmission oil
• Replace radiator cap
• Replace transfer case oil (4WD/AWD)
• Replace wiper blades
• Rotate tires (except G35 Coupe, Sport)
• Optional: flush automatic transmission (flush with ATF)
• Inspect the following:

__ All lights
__ Axle & suspension parts
__ Brake lines & cables
__ Brake calipers, pads, rotors
__ Brake light & cruise control switches
__ Drive shaft boots (4WD/AWD)
__ Exhaust system
__ Front suspension ball joints
__ Fuel lines/connections
__ Fuel tank vapor vent system hoses
__ Headlights/adjust if necessary
__ Propeller shaft (4WD/AWD)
__ Steering gear and linkage
__ Steering linkage ball joints

The tire store will give me a free rotation, so that can be eliminated; I don’t have AWD, so those items are irrelevant; I replaced all the belts at 90k, so they should be okay; all the expendable brake parts have been done within the last 24 months and there are no obvious signs of problems.

I would, however, like some input into this mysterious “climate-controlled seat filter” on the higher-end models. I can think of some things related to seats that really ought to be filtered, you know?

In the two and a half years since Gwendolyn’s arrival, I have generally preferred to replace those parts that needed replacing with Nissan’s actual replacement parts from the lone Infiniti dealer in town, reasoning that (1) they seem to know what they’re doing, (2) the Infiniti store is a tad closer to me than the nearest Nissan shop, and (3) there’s no reason to think I’d get any break on the price by buying the parts from said Nissan shop.

I have deviated from this scheme exactly once: when I had all the dampers replaced. At the time, I said this:

A set of fresh factory struts, installed by fresh factory-trained techs, would run close to two thousand dollars. This struck me as excessive, and eventually I addressed myself to Monroe, which sells zillions of aftermarket shocks, and who, I discovered, had come up with the struts for the contemporary Nissan Altima, suggesting to me that they might have some idea about how to hold up the corners of other Nissan products. Of their three lines, only the topmost, the Sensa-Trac, is offered for the Maxima and its Infiniti sister; it’s nearly as pricey as the factory strut, but can be installed by mere mortals.

I am a fair shadetree mechanic, and by “fair” I mean better than “poor” but not as good as “good”; I can handle some things, but installation of struts is well above my pay grade. I farmed out this job to my preferred tire store, and pocketed / failed to spend [choose one] a thousand dollars or so.

I wasn’t expecting a similar compromise yesterday, but I had noticed some graunching noises from the wipers, accompanied by some streakiness, and I decided to buy new blades. (I have discovered that I can change blades in mere seconds, but fitting new inserts kills the whole afternoon. Maybe I’m closer to “poor” than I’d like to think.) The Infiniti parts guy looked at the shelf and said sadly that yes, we have no bananas Nissan-branded blades in these sizes in stock at this time; could we interest you in a Rain-X replacement?

They could, I decided. He brought the impostors out to the car, which duly impressed me inasmuch as it was 29 degrees and the wind had picked up a howl on the way down from Nunavut, and once assured that they did in fact fit Nissan’s wiper arm, we had a deal. I note with some amusement that Nissan charges more for the driver’s side blade than for the passenger’s side, no doubt because it’s six inches longer; apparently Rain-X does not. Amount pocketed / not spent [choose one]: about $9. I have no idea what kind of warranty coverage I have on these, but geez, they’re just wiper blades, they’ll be gone in a year or two.

Mark Alger details his Hierarchy of Vehicular Needs:

I prize (in this order), comfort, wide field of vision, visibility, crash-survivability, winter traction, and cargo capacity over fuel economy.

Which got me thinking: what criteria drew me to my present set of wheels? Expediency was certainly a factor, since my previous set of wheels had been rendered inoperable and, in the judgment of some auto-insurance type, unfixable, but there were thousands of cars for sale that June day in Oklahoma City, and Carmax would happily have trucked one up from elsewhere had I asked, so there had to be something drawing me to this particular car.

The first order of business was size, and there were two sets of dimensions to consider:

• Many people seeing me seated assume I’m six-five or six-six, until I stand up and reveal myself to be more of a point guard than a power forward: six feet even, with a 28-inch inseam. So I could give a flip about legroom; I just want to make sure I don’t scrape my scalp against the headliner.
• The garage at Surlywood was built in 1951 — three years after the rest of the house — and was not ideally suited to the longer, lower, wider stuff that Detroit ground out later in the decade. The previous owner drove a Nissan Maxima, so I would consider no vehicles that substantially exceeded its size.

Beyond that, I was looking for some measure of reliability, since I was buying used, and I didn’t like the machine-gun slits that passed for windows in some recent models. I ignored utterly the crash-test results — having just had a crash, I was in no mood to contemplate the likelihood of another — and I paid only perfunctory attention to fuel economy, inasmuch as all the cars under consideration were what the EPA terms “mid-size,” and that commonality of size suggested to me that gas consumption was likely to be about the same with any of them.

What sealed the deal, though, was a piece of cheap metal: the badge. As I explained at the time:

As a practicing plebe, I’ve always felt that if you want a Camry, you should buy a Camry, and forgo the big L badge. But there’s another side to this story: suppose, just suppose, that the guy who buys the Lexus, knowing he paid the big bucks, actually does a better job of taking care of his pricey little beastie?

And the other side of that coin: the Lexus dealership, by repute anyway, is going to be more anxious to curry the favor (possibly even the favour) of its customers than is your average Toyota store.

Which explains why I have an Infiniti I30, which, were it not for the badge and some glitz and 100 lb of sound insulation and a whole lot of manufacturer obsequiousness, would have been, yes, a Nissan Maxima. It’s something of a tradition around this house.

D-E-A-L-I-N-G?

South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co has had talks with Chrysler LLC owner Cerberus Capital Management about a potential acquisition of the struggling U.S. automaker’s Jeep brand and possibly other assets, people with knowledge of the talks said on Friday.

The emergence of South Korea’s largest automaker as a potential bidder for at least part of Chrysler comes on the same day General Motors Corp said it was abandoning its own pursuit of an acquisition of its cross-town rival.

Cerberus also plans to restart talks [with] other potential partners, including Renault-Nissan, the sources added.

First, the obvious point: people with no “knowledge of the talks” wouldn’t say things like that.

Actually, Hyundai and Jeep fit together fairly well. Jeep, unlike the other Mopar brands, has a fair amount of brand equity these days, and there’s very little overlap in the product lines: the nascent Kia Borrego is probably the only model that would be rendered superfluous. (Yeah, there’s the Jeep Compass/Patriot, but they were superfluous before there was any merger talk.)

Getting hold of Chrysler’s extensive dealer network might theoretically be useful to Hyundai, which still has a reputation for fast-talking guys in plaid jackets catering to subprime customers. But the advantage goes away if they have to sell actual Chryslers as part of the deal, so I suspect that if there’s any deal here, it will be just for Jeep.

How to dispose of the rest of the company? We know that Nissan is dumping its big Titan truck after 2010, replacing it with a version of the Dodge Ram, and that Nissan will be building two small cars for Chrysler, one a Versa variant for South America and another to be sold in Chrysler’s “global markets,” such as they are. And Carlos Ghosn has long made noises about adding a US-based affiliate to the existing Nissan/Renault partnership. Nissan doesn’t need Jeep, really, since they have enough SUVs for a dwindling market; assuming Jeep goes to Hyundai, Nissan could reposition Dodge as strictly a truck brand — the Viper will be spun off to a third party, the Challenger will run its course, the rest don’t matter — and use the Chrysler channel for minivans (wouldn’t you rather have a Town & Country than a Caravan, even a Grand one?), the aforementioned Nissan-built small car, the successor to the 300 (let us pray), and the occasional revamp of a Renault Euromobile, though this latter might be tricky, since the one Renault that might sell well here, the mid-sized Laguna, could steal sales from Nissan’s Altima, built on the same platform.

A third, dimmer prospect: Volkswagen, for whom Chrysler is already building a minivan. We know VW wants to increase its market share in the States — in fact, they’re building a plant in Chattanooga to take advantage of the relatively-weak dollar. But I suspect they want to do it under their own name, not somebody else’s.

I pay attention to what’s happening to the Nissan Maxima, inasmuch as it’s no particular secret that Gwendolyn, her Infiniti badge notwithstanding, is basically a Maxima in a prom dress. And since Infiniti got out of the front-drive vehicle business after ’04, if I want to stay on this sort of platform in the future, I have to go for the Maxima or persuade myself that I’d be happier in an Acura TL.

Not a lot has changed between the ’00 and ’09; Nissan’s ubiquitous VQ engine is on hand, serving up 290 hp (versus 227), peaking at 6400 (versus, well, 6400). The same old governor kicks in just beyond the 130-mph mark.

Then there are the little things that Nissan does to keep you from trashing the car out of sheer exuberance. From Gwendolyn’s manual:

When the engine coolant temperature and outside air temperature are low, the air flow from the floor vents may not operate for a maximum of 150 seconds. However, this is not a malfunction. After the coolant temperature has warmed up, the air flow from the floor outlets will operate normally.

If this were just a comfort feature, you’d shrug. But elsewhere:

The overdrive does not engage until the engine has warmed up.

According to my informal testing, this takes a maximum of, you guessed it, 150 seconds.

Car and Driver tested an ’09 Maxima in the September issue, and this little notification appeared in one corner of the test-results panel in the print edition:

A three-mile cool-down run was required between every acceleration run. Otherwise, the engine computer would hold the revs to 4000.

Given the price tag on a replacement VQ, this is probably just as well.