nissan 4 door pseudo american version of a sporty like car
in the next installment of rental car chronicles: the nissan maxima sl, topline trim! i was super lazy and woke up at 5:45am so that i could get on the road to be in memphis and then had to hustle back after work so no time for cool pictures. i took a screenshot of nissan’s build your own site.. hope thats kosher for here?
bear with me for a small tangent cause i’m gonna start this story with a memory of a trip i took many a moon ago. my now ex wife and i went to cabo san lucas one year. it was my first time there and as im walking around and seeing all of this opulence at the all inclusive hotels - then going to ‘town’ and looking at all of the places you could take a tequila shot upside down off a frog, buy a $30 trinket necklace or $40 seashell or badly screenprinted ‘cabo’ tee shirts, stuff your face with food that mysteriously looked little like any of the food that you’d see any local people eating and it all made me think quite a bit about what this place really was trying to be. it bugged me for the first few days and i really couldn’t put my finger on why it bothered me so much.
and then finally one morning i woke up and thought - this place is what the people that live here must think that americans think that like mexico looks like.
why is that relevant? because tangentially similar to my cabo experience, i think that that this car is what nissan’s engineers think that americans think that sportiness feels like in a car.
at first glance, all is great. you get in, it is somewhat low to the ground, looks sporty, the seating position is sporty - then getting up to full highway speed takes just a few seconds. it eats up the highway miles, soaks up the road imperfections fairly well, stays fairly planted at speed. but after a while behind the wheel, you start to pick apart at the seams a bit. even in sport mode, the steering was playstation-like with very little tangible connection between the effort that you put into turning a wheel and what that wheel then did to the direction of your car. and as you gained speed, it didnt gain any tightness or provide any extra awareness - you’re basically just swerving around hoping that your movements were small enough to not sideswipe your highway neighbors. what felt like 67% of the throttle existed within about 15% of the gas pedal, so modulating speed also felt a little weird. small jabs of the brakes to, for example, disable the radar speed control - resulted in a head bopping suspension travel, which i couldnt really figure out whether had more to do with overly touchy brakes or subpar control over lifting/diving from the suspension.
so it was easy togo fast and feel somewhat ’sporty’ i suppose but not actually in ways that actual sporty cars behave. what it did do well was to make the driver (me) feel fairly comfy in its super comfy seats in a sporty position that was able to go moderately fast. how it would fare around a track or twisty country road, i dont know and not sure i’d wanna find out. honestly though, i think what it does offer probably is all that most of us ‘murican’s really need in terms of having a sporty drive. as for me, i’ll gladly take something like my m240i for feeling sporty (or a 3 series if it had to be apples to apples as a 4 door car). (please no jokes about bmw’s somewhat lifeless steering, its vastly better than this maxima was)
other thoughts
the doors and ESPECIALLY the trunk opens and closes with a lightness that makes you wonder if there is any real metal inside them. there is no satisfying *thunk* when you close anything.
for being a rather large car (its within an inch in length of a 3 row 7 passenger gmc acadia) it feels rather cozy up front, and crazily enough, there is less rearseat leg room than in the altima, which is the next size class down as well as the sentra which is 2 size classes down.
not. one. rattle. in a rental car with 31 thousand miles. that’s impressive interior build quality.
cvt’s are.. not.. my favorite, but honestly in this application it seemed to do its job pretty seamlessly well.