What's Wrong With This Picture: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Edition

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

It’s easy to see the two Japanese luxury brands as Wahlberg brothers. Lexus is Marky Mark, the one which started off by flexing some low-priced knock-off S-Class clones and has gone on to make big bucks, receive critical acclaim. and fantasize in public about stopping 9/11 while respectful pop-culture writers whistle in awed approval. Infiniti is Donnie, who started out very stylishly but quickly became B-List despite popping out the occasional respected performance.

Part of the reason for that prestige gap between Lexus and Infiniti has to be what you see in this photo, which I snapped on the way back from lunch today. We have two vehicles here which are ostensibly from different brands and certainly don’t share any major dimensional commonalities or mechanical components, but I’ll be darned if they don’t look like the same car to most people.

The Sentra and G37 aren’t the only Infiniti/Nissan efforts which are totally different under the skin but very similar in the metal. Think first-gen Murano and FX, for example. Lexus does it the other way ’round, creating visually different vehicles from the Camry platform. Who’s right? It’s hard to say, but it’s easy to see that buyers prefer the approach where you put lipstick on a pig to the one where you dress a BMW like a Sentra.

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • Slab Slab on May 21, 2012

    After the first paragraph, I thought this was going in a completely different direction. Based on recent photos of Marky Mark, I assumed you were going to talk about how bloated and oversized Lexus has become.

  • Ranwhenparked Ranwhenparked on May 21, 2012

    Part of Infiniti's problem has been its inability to maintain a full range of products. Lexus built its early reputation on positioning the first-gen LS as a "halo" product and has always done a very good job of keeping that car sacrosanct as their flagship model. Infiniti sort of botched things with the first Q45. It was a great car in most respects, but it got off to an uneasy start sales-wise and just never recovered. Still, a proper luxury brand needs a proper full-size flagship, and the Q45 at least filled that crucial image building role. Infiniti hasn't had that since 2006. Actually, with the M an the G, they really only have TWO car lines. Compare that to Lexus, with SEVEN cars, and even Cadillac with three now, and you see that Infiniti simply isn't covering much of the market. They're aiming for the bottom and midrange of the luxury sedan market, and really nothing else.

  • Chicagoland Chicagoland on May 21, 2012

    It's in the eye of the beholder. I mix up Avalons, Camrys and ES's all the time. And some other car blogs put Lexus in 'attack of the biege cars'. Some younger car fans compare the new face of Lexus to 'cockroaches'. Or worse, 'Japanese Oldsmobile sucking a lemon'. The German luxuary makes are fighting back hard knocking Lexus from #1. 1989 was ages ago when they 'shook up' the luxury market. They got to do more than 'nice showrooms'. Also, someone else made a good point: "the bulk of Lexus sales have been models like the RX and ES which are FWD-Camry platform derived models," YEP! The common RX is today's 'soccer ma car'.

    • Bd2 Bd2 on May 22, 2012

      That's why Nissan is getting into the game with the 3-row CUV, the JX. The RWD-based FX had "luxury car" credentials but it (being a "sporty CUV with limited room) is a niche product and in order to gain sales, Nissan needed an Infiniti model geared to all the "soccer moms."

  • Dtremit Dtremit on May 22, 2012

    "We have two vehicles here which are ostensibly from different brands..." ...in the US. Why should anyone be surprised that a car designed as a Nissan, and sold as a Nissan in its largest market, looks like a Nissan? Then again, Nissan has never been good at branding -- let's not forget that at the time they introduced the Infiniti brand (with ads that didn't show cars), the Datsun brand still had better name recognition in the US than did Nissan.

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