Junkyard Find: 1991 Infiniti M30
When Nissan decided to push some chips into the serious North American luxury-car-market game, they didn’t have the resources to do what Toyota did and build an all-new machine from scratch. Instead, they turned the President luxury sedan into the Q45 and the Leopard sport coupe into the M30. Infiniti sold the M30 for just a few years before being replaced by the J30 for the 1993 model year. It’s been nearly forgotten today.
Here’s a very rare ’91 that I spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service wrecking yard a couple of weeks ago.
The M30 had rear-wheel drive, a four-speed automatic transmission, and a 162 horsepower member of the same VG30 V6 engine family that went into everything from the 300ZX to the Mercury Villager.
Under the hood, this classy tag displays engine specs.
This one has just over 150,000 miles on the clock, but it’s pretty well used up. The California sun has not been kind to this car’s leather upholstery, and the white duct tape wasn’t much of an improvement.
The J30 sold pretty well, and the M45 (a decade later) boasted a 340-horse V8, but memories of the M30 have faded by now.
The first US-market ads for the Q45 and M30 didn’t even show a car. Instead, geese.
“It’s like holding a well-made, perfectly balanced tool.”
In Japan, meanwhile, the Leopard got ads like this, featuring a sultry French woman.
Private Coupé!
[Images: © 2016 Murilee Martin/The Truth About Cars]
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
We never got these M30s in Australia. The only Infiniti we got at the time was the Q45 (introduced in 1991) and it flopped, partially due to it's high purchase price (A$140,000) and was subsequently withdrawn in 1993. They have since returned however. As for this car, it's reached the end and probably looked like it well before it ended up here...
The owner of one of the big dealerships here in Portland owned one of these in white before he passed so I'm assuming his son has it now. Not that they ever drive it. Last I saw it the thing had been crammed into the corner of one of their temporarily unused showrooms away from the public eye. I believe it only had something like 27,000 miles on it.