Infiniti VP: New RWD Sedan Will Put Performance Ahead of Luxury

Earlier this year, we caught wind of a rumor that Infiniti had plans to get back into the sedan game with a new “Q70S” model packing rear-wheel drive, a powerful engine, and a manual transmission. Guess what? It’s true—well, mostly; Infiniti is not inclined to confirm the model name just yet—and we’ll see it here by 2027.

So why a sedan, and why not right now? After all, Infiniti only recently got out of the luxury sedan game, and Nissan still cranks out the Skyline (the old Q50 by another name) for its home market. A simple revival could be accomplished with little effort, but according to Tiago Castro, Infiniti’s vice president for the Americas, that’s not the sort of strategy the company is interested in at the moment.

“We want to go back to the roots of Infiniti and build a product portfolio where we can continue to grow demand,” Castro told me in a brief one-on-one interview this week. And more than that, he said that performance, not luxury, will be the sedan’s guiding philosophy. Color us intrigued.

Going forward, Infiniti will limit itself to no more than one new product per year, allowing it to dial in its focus on the premium market, which, according to Castro, offers more opportunity for growth than the mainstream market. Its shoppers are also more loyal when when properly taken care of, he noted.

If Infiniti can attract customers with deeper pockets, it will help the brand justify scaling back to a smaller showroom. Its goal, then, is to build a reputation as a premium alternative to the “vanilla” offerings currently on the market. To accomplish this, Infiniti will need to “do less, but do it very, very well,” Castro said.

This will have ramifications for Infiniti’s sedan strategy. The company will likely not revive a full model range a la the old G or Q lineups, but instead produce a single, purpose-built sport sedan intended to attract those niche buyers. Imagine if BMW discontinued every 3 Series except for the M3, and you’re vaguely in the ballpark.

That said, Castro didn’t want to commit to a performance target this early in the game (remember: one new product per year), but it would stand to reason that a new performance-oriented sport sedan would target what is arguably the segment benchmark—in other words, the opposite of vanilla.

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