Reviews · Retrospective

Ahead of the Applause

The Infiniti FX45 was a sports car wearing an SUV's clothes, five years before anyone had a word for that. It was quick, it was gorgeous, it was a genuine status symbol — and then the world caught up, and stopped looking.

By Theo Wren  ·  Reviews  ·  15 min read

You have to put yourself back in a suburban parking lot in the spring of 2003 to understand what this thing did to people.

The lot is full of Explorers. Trailblazers. A first-generation ML, a Grand Cherokee, an X5 that everyone agrees is the sporty one. They are all, without exception, boxes. Tall, upright, sensible boxes with a greenhouse bolted to a chassis, wheels tucked politely under the arches, and a face designed by committee to look Capable.

And then something crouches in among them, in a copper that looks wet even when it's dry, sitting on twenty-inch wheels that fill the arches the way a boxer's shoulders fill a jacket. Its roof is too low. Its hood is too long. Its rear glass is laid so far back it looks like it's leaning into a corner while parked. Two fat exhaust tips exit the rear valance like it has somewhere to be.

Nobody in that parking lot has a category for it. There isn't one yet.

Liquid Copper, paint code R12, offered only for 2003–2005. It is the color the FX was designed in and it is the color the FX should be photographed in.

Act OneHubris, in the good sense

The FX did not arrive by accident, and it did not arrive from a confident company. It arrived from a company that had very recently been on fire.

Development began in 1999, under the revival plan Carlos Ghosn brought to a Nissan that was drowning in debt. Companies in that condition usually build sensible things. Nissan instead greenlit a crossover styled around a theme its design chief Shiro Nakamura described as a bionic cheetah — an animal-shaped predator, mechanically augmented, crouched and ready. A concept went to Detroit in January 2001 to test whether anyone would tolerate the idea. A second, essentially production-ready concept went back to Detroit in January 2002. The road car went on sale in January 2003.

Internally the styling brief had a second name, and it is the more useful one: cool fusion. The designers wanted the substantial lower body of a sport-utility welded underneath the sleek, elegant upper body of a sports GT. Two vehicles, fused at the beltline. Everything strange and wonderful about the FX comes out of that one decision — the low roof, the tiny rear glass, the enormous mass under the doors, the way the wheels have to be huge because a normal wheel would look like a caster under all that metal.

Underneath it, Nissan did something no other performance SUV of the era did: it didn't use an SUV. The FX sits on the FM — Front Midship — platform, the rear-drive architecture that also carried the 350Z and the G35. The engine sits behind the front axle line. Weight distribution on the V8 all-wheel-drive car works out to 54:46. That is a sports sedan's number attached to a 4,300-pound crossover, and it is the single mechanical fact that explains everything about how the FX behaves.

Infiniti chose eight launch colors specifically to argue with the vehicle's own aggression, and two of them still define the car: Laser Red, and the copper the press materials called the signature — Liquid Copper. When the FX was facelifted for 2006, the copper came back as Autumn Copper, a shade darker and a shade more respectable. Something had already begun to soften.

Act TwoThe weapon

The FX45 got the VK45DE: 4,494 cc, DOHC, thirty-two valves, aluminum block and heads, titanium intake and exhaust valves, molybdenum-coated pistons, continuously variable intake timing. It was, essentially, the Q45's flagship V8, detuned by twenty-five horsepower for duty in a crossover — which tells you something about the pecking order at Infiniti in 2003, and something about the FX that it was allowed anywhere near that engine at all.

315 horsepower at 6,400 rpm. 329 lb-ft at 4,000. A five-speed automatic with a manual gate. ATTESA E-TS all-wheel drive, rear-biased, standard — the FX45 was never offered in rear-drive-only form. Twenty-inch wheels on 265/50 rubber, standard, in 2003, when a BMW X5 was rolling on seventeens and eighteens.

The performance figures above come from Car and Driver's instrumented test, and the sentence that test produced is the one that should be engraved somewhere. The FX45, they wrote, was the quickest production SUV they'd tested since the long-dead GMC Typhoon. It walked away from the BMW X5 4.6is and the Mercedes ML55 AMG, both of which needed 6.5 seconds to do what the Infiniti did in 6.3.

Then look at the other two numbers, because those are the ones that matter. 0.87 g on the skidpad, and 160 feet from 70 mph. In 2003. In a crossover. Those are not SUV figures. Those are figures a well-sorted sports sedan would have been proud of, and the FX was producing them while carrying a hatchback's worth of cargo space and a family's worth of ground clearance.

For 2006, the facelift brought a revised V8 — reworked intake tract, new pistons, revised cam profiles, a shorter and wider intake manifold, electronic exhaust valve timing, lightened internals — good for 320 horsepower and 335 lb-ft. Peak power arrived 400 rpm lower, which made it feel stronger in traffic than the four extra horsepower suggest.

Act ThreeThe road

Here is the thing that the spec sheet cannot tell you, and it is the reason people who owned these still talk about them twenty-three years later.

The FX does not drive like a tall vehicle pretending. It drives like a wide vehicle that happens to be tall. There is a difference, and you feel it in the first corner.

You turn in, and the nose goes where you pointed it — immediately, with no wind-up, no lean, no slow rotation of a body on soft springs while the tires wait to find out what's happening. Almost zero roll. The car takes a set and stays there. There's no scrubbing, no push, no tail-wagging drama on corner exit; the rear axle just takes the torque and the ATTESA system trims the rest so quietly you'd never know it was working.

Find a back road with real geometry — a road that bends, then dips, then bends the other way — and the FX gets genuinely, improbably good. The long wheelbase and wide track give it a composure over compressions that a shorter, taller crossover simply cannot manage. It arrives at the dip flat, absorbs it in the springs rather than in the body, and comes out already loaded for the next turn. You end up carrying speed you have no business carrying in something with roof rails.

It was never going to win off-road. Nobody bought one to win off-road. On a road with bends, dips and consequences, it was the most surprising thing on the market.

The steering is the flaw, and it's an honest one. It's hydraulic and it is heavy — heavier than it needs to be, weighted for a sensation of substance rather than a stream of information. It's accurate. It is not talkative. Period reviewers said, correctly, that lighter and more communicative steering would have made the FX45 dangerously easy to drive very fast. As delivered, it asks you to commit and then trust it, which is a fair enough bargain but a different one from what a 911 offers.

The throttle is the other flaw, and it's less honest. It's hair-triggered off idle — an old Nissan habit of the era, tuned to make a heavy vehicle feel eager in the first six inches of pedal travel. It makes the FX45 feel savage in a parking garage and makes smoothness genuinely difficult in traffic. Once you're past it and the V8 is breathing, everything is wonderful: the VK45DE is a smooth, hard-revving thing with a real bark through those split tailpipes when you ask it to pass.

And then there's the ride, which is where the twenty-inch wheels present their invoice. Fifty-series tires on twenty-inch rims, on a sport-tuned suspension, in 2003, before adaptive damping was something you could option on a $45,000 vehicle. The industry term is head-toss. The owner's term is less polite. One decent speed bump taken at low speed will separate you from your seat. On smooth pavement the FX is magnificent; on a broken city street it beats you up, and it never stops reminding you which one you're on.

The taillights extend slightly beyond the bodywork — Infiniti said it was for aerodynamic effect. Whether or not that held up in the tunnel, it made the rear read wider than it was.

Act FourThe cabin

The interior deserves better than it usually gets, because it was doing something specific and it did it well.

Infiniti built the cabin on what it called the Personalized Zone Concept: three distinct territories — driver, front passenger, rear passengers — each with its own treatment rather than one continuous dashboard sweeping across all of them. The driver gets a cockpit, canted toward them, with sports-car-shaped controls and a small-diameter wheel. The passenger gets a separate warm-surfaced zone. It sounds like marketing. Sit in one and it isn't; the car genuinely addresses you differently depending on which seat you're in.

The materials were a step-change for the brand. Real aluminum — not aluminum-look plastic — on the center console, the shifter surround, the wheel spokes, the door pulls. Heavily grained leather that period reviewers compared, generously but not absurdly, to the hides used by the Italians. Cushioned console lid, armrests and door panels exactly where your elbows land. The signature Infiniti analog clock. Aluminum pedals. A 7-inch information monitor when most rivals were offering a 5-inch one and calling it a nav system.

Infiniti also used the FX to run ahead on driver assistance. The 2005 cars got lane departure warning — one of the first such systems offered to American buyers on anything. Later cars added adaptive cruise, a rear camera on a color screen as standard equipment, and an iPod interface, which in 2007 was a genuine selling point.

What it got wrong inside

Rear visibility is bad. Not stylish-compromise bad — actually bad. The roofline that makes the profile is the roofline that shrinks the rear glass, and the rear headrests neatly block the quarter windows on top of that. The large side mirrors help. They do not fix it.

The cabin is snug, deliberately. High door sills, low roof, a cocooned driving position. Wonderful if you want to feel wrapped around; less wonderful if you are tall, or if you had assumed that a vehicle this size would seat five in comfort. It seats four properly. Cargo space behind the seats is a bit under 29 cubic feet — respectable for a wagon, modest for something this long.

The turning circle is wide and parking is a chore. And the chassis, while more athletic than an X5's, is not as rigid; there is a slight looseness over bad surfaces that the German car doesn't have. The FX45 felt faster and sharper than the BMW. The BMW felt more expensively built.

Fuel economy was terrible and everybody knew it. The period EPA numbers say 15 city and 19 highway. Real testers got 16 with a lot of highway in the mix, and 11 if they enjoyed themselves. There was no version of the FX45 that was cheap to run.

Act FiveThe court it walked into

The FX45 landed in the middle of the most absurd and most entertaining arms race the SUV world has ever staged, and it is worth laying out who else was in the room.

The performance-SUV court, 2003–2008

Vehicle	Engine	HP	lb-ft	0–60
Infiniti FX45 (2003)	4.5 V8	315	329	6.3
Infiniti FX35 (2003)	3.5 V6	280	270	7.3
BMW X5 4.8is (2004)	4.8 V8	355	360	6.1
Mercedes ML55 AMG	5.4 V8	342	376	6.5
Porsche Cayenne Turbo (2003)	4.5 tt V8	450	457	5.3
Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 (2006)	6.1 HEMI V8	420	420	≈4.9
Porsche Cayenne Turbo S (2006)	4.5 tt V8	514	531	5.0

Read that table honestly and the FX45 is not the fastest thing in the room. It never was. The Cayenne Turbo had it comfortably, and by 2006 the Turbo S — 514 horsepower, 531 lb-ft, five seconds flat, 171 mph, and eleven inches of ground clearance if you wanted it — was operating in a different financial universe as well as a different performance one. The Jeep SRT8 arrived in 2006 with a naturally aspirated 6.1-liter HEMI, 420 horsepower, and the specific American gift for making 420 horsepower cost less than a loaded Accord.

But the FX45 was cheaper than the German cars by five to ten thousand dollars, roughly seven hundred pounds lighter than comparably equipped rivals, marginally quicker than the ones it was priced against, and — this is the part that isn't on any spec sheet — vastly more daring to look at. The Cayenne looked like a 911 that had eaten a Touareg, which it essentially was. The X5 looked like a 5 Series on stilts. The ML looked like a filing cabinet. The FX looked like nothing else that had ever been sold.

Act SixThe tragic flaw

Every tragedy needs the hero to carry the seed of their own undoing, and the FX45's was standing right next to it on the showroom floor, wearing a smaller badge and a lower price.

The FX35 had the VQ35DE — 280 horsepower, 270 lb-ft, the same engine family that made the 350Z and the G35 into cult objects. It cost $36,245 against the FX45's roughly $44,800. It weighed nearly a hundred pounds less. It rode on eighteen-inch wheels wearing taller 60-series sidewalls, which meant it did not punish you over expansion joints. It could be had in rear-wheel drive, which the V8 car could not. It returned 16 city and 22 highway instead of 15 and 19.

And it was a full second slower to sixty.

One second. That is the entire gap. For one second, buyers were asked to pay nearly nine thousand dollars more, accept a harsher ride, lose the rear-drive option, and visit the pump more often. Period reviewers said out loud what buyers were already working out for themselves: the FX35 gave you nine-tenths of the experience and was, on most real roads, the more pleasant vehicle to actually live with.

The V8 was the reason the FX existed. The V6 was the reason people bought one.

This is not a criticism of the FX35 — it's a very good car and it is the sensible answer. But it is the mechanism by which the FX45 became rare, and rarity in a mainstream vehicle is not glamour. It's a warning light.

Act SevenThe second act

The second-generation FX broke cover at Geneva in March 2008 and went on sale that June. The FX45 name went away; in its place came the FX50, and the FX50 was better in every single measurable respect.

The new VK50VE was a 5.0-liter V8 with VVEL — Nissan's variable valve event and lift system — mounted low in the chassis to drop the center of gravity. 390 horsepower. 362 lb-ft. Seventy more horsepower than the outgoing FX45, better fuel economy than the engine it replaced, and a seven-speed automatic in place of the old five. 0–60 fell to 5.0 seconds flat; the FX50 S ran a 13.6-second quarter at 104 mph. The V6 car became the FX35 with the VQ35HR — 303 horsepower — and later the FX37, with 325.

You could order four-wheel steering. Adaptive headlights. A 360-degree camera system. Intelligent cruise control that would bring the car to a complete stop and move it off again without you. Intelligent brake assist that would initiate emergency braking on its own. In 2008. The FX50 was, on paper and on a stopwatch, comprehensively the better vehicle.

Nobody was stunned. That was the problem.

The design was an evolution — deliberately, sensibly, defensibly. The headlights stretched further and sharpened. The arches got more muscular. The grille got wider; one reviewer, not unkindly, said it looked like a catfish's mouth. Every line was traceable to the 2003 car. Reviewers at the time described it exactly as what it was: a direct evolution of a shape that had already established its niche, changed only as much as necessary.

Which is the correct commercial decision and the wrong emotional one. The first FX made people stop in parking lots. The second FX made people say oh, the new one. The dancer was as graceful as ever — arguably more so, with better damping, a better cabin, and a far better engine. But nobody was frightened anymore.

Better in every measurable way. That turned out not to be the measurement that mattered.

What the numbers did

Two honest caveats before anyone draws too straight a line. The second generation launched into the autumn of 2008, which was not a good moment to be selling a 390-horsepower luxury crossover to anybody. And the FX was moving upmarket in price as the segment filled with cheaper alternatives.

But the shape of it is unmistakable. The first FX peaked at 28,786 American sales in 2005, the same year Infiniti as a brand hit its own record of 207,129. The 12,670 figure for 2008 is a split year — first-generation cars through the spring, second-generation cars from June — so it belongs to both. Every clean second-generation year came in below it, and the best of them, 11,532 in 2012, was barely 40 percent of what the original managed at its peak. In 2014 the nameplate was retired entirely; the car became the QX70, and the QX70 is a vehicle almost nobody has an opinion about.

Act EightThe house of Infiniti

Here's where it stops being one car's story.

The FX is not an isolated case. It is the third or fourth verse of a song Infiniti has been singing since 1989, and the pattern is remarkably consistent: build something genuinely startling, be admired for it, then follow it with something competent that nobody's heart moves for.

Q45 — the presence

The 1990 Q45 arrived as Infiniti's founding statement and it remains one of the great pieces of automotive presence, full stop. A 4.5-liter V8 making 278 horsepower and 292 lb-ft, rear drive, four-wheel steering and active suspension available on the Q45t, four thousand pounds of intent — and, most famously, a face with no grille at all. Just a body-colored panel with a cloisonné badge in the middle of it, at a moment when every luxury sedan on earth was defined by the chrome shield on its nose.

In a dark color, on those broad multi-spoke wheels — polished discs wide enough to see your reflection in, the kind that read as a single flat plane from ten feet away — the Q45 still stops a room. It is a car that never raised its voice and never needed to. Infiniti has not built anything with that quality of stillness since.

The second-generation Q45 was a rebadged Nissan Cima. The third was another Cima with a 340-horsepower V8 and better hardware than the original, and by then nobody was arguing about it. The nameplate was quietly retired after 2006.

M45 — the sleeper

The 2003 M45 is the deepest cut in the catalog and the one enthusiasts should be talking about more. Take the Japanese-market Nissan Gloria/Cedric body — upright, slab-sided, faintly municipal — and drop in the 340-horsepower VK45DE with 333 lb-ft, rear drive, for somewhere in the low forties. It was, in the most literal sense, a Q45 for ten thousand dollars less in a suit nobody looked at twice.

The press was merciless about the styling. Autoweek compared the design charm to a late-'70s Ford LTD. They were not wrong, and it did not matter — because if you wanted to embarrass a German sedan at a stoplight in 2003 while wearing a disguise, this was the machine. It sold terribly. Of course it did.

The M that replaced it for 2006 was a genuinely credible 5 Series rival on the FX's stiffened FM platform, with the M35's 280-horsepower V6 and the M45's 335-horsepower V8, and it was reviewed respectfully everywhere. Respect is not the same as being wanted. The M became the Q70 in 2014 and faded out.

G35 — the ace

And then the one that actually landed. The 2003 G35 was Motor Trend's Car of the Year and made Car and Driver's 10Best in both 2003 and 2004. Rear drive, FM platform, 52:48 balance, a 3.5-liter V6 that would eventually make 298 horsepower with the six-speed manual, a coupe that looked like real money, and a price that started under thirty thousand dollars.

People did not describe the G35 as a good Infiniti. They described it as a 3 Series problem. That is the highest compliment the industry had to give in 2003 and Infiniti earned it outright.

Then the G37 arrived — more power, more polish, better in nearly every way, and the conversation had already moved on. Then in 2013 the Q50 replaced it, and the Q50 has been soldiering on with essentially the same basic car for more than a decade. The nameplate change alone cost Infiniti dearly: the brand renamed its entire lineup coming off its best-ever sales year, and the sales curve has not recovered since.

Act NineThe Sixth Sense problem

There is a particular kind of success that punishes whoever achieves it, and it is worth naming, because Infiniti has suffered from it more than any other manufacturer of the modern era.

When The Sixth Sense came out, it did something that only works once. The twist was not merely clever; it retroactively rewrote everything you had already watched. And the moment the credits rolled, the audience did not think what a fine film. They thought do that to me again.

The next film was good. Several of the next ones were good. It didn't help, because the audience wasn't grading the film — they were grading the feeling, against a benchmark that could not be hit twice by definition. Once you know a twist is coming, you cannot be surprised by one.

Infiniti keeps acing the test and then getting punished for the fact that it isn't a new test.

That's the trap, and Infiniti has walked into it four times. The Q45 without a grille. The G35 that made everyone reconsider the 3 Series. The M45 hiding a flagship V8 in a municipal suit. And the FX — a sports car in SUV clothing, sold years before the market invented the category and then filled it with a hundred imitations.

In each case the follow-up was better engineered, better finished and better equipped. And in each case the follow-up was measured against a shock it structurally could not deliver, because the shock had already been spent — by them, in the previous generation, on the previous audience.

The alternative would have been to blow the whole thing up every six years and start over. That is a legitimate strategy. It is also how you lose the customers you already have, and Infiniti did not have enough of those to gamble with. So they iterated, sensibly, and were rewarded with indifference.