#InfinitiM

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.

With its highest monthly U.S. sales total in more than three years, Infiniti’s flagship Q70 sedan produced a 68% year-over-year increase in March 2015. That performance was followed up in April by a 115% YOY improvement for the Q70, formerly known as the M.

Yet even with particularly outstanding numbers relative to the model’s recent history, the 5-Series rival from Japan’s lowest-volume premium brand continues to be largely forgotten. Or worse, ignored.

Both Infiniti and Lexus know how to ruin a car. The Lexus GS 450h and the Infiniti M Hybrid are what results from taking a fundamentally good car and adding a bustle full of batteries. It’s more galling now because of what’s happened to these two. For years, both the M and the GS were mildly interesting also-rans that couldn’t compete with the established segment leaders on any measure but price/value. But now, you’ve got an Eastern Jaguar and a crisp Arleigh-Burke class sedan that are mounting a more credible challenge against the benchmark Germans. The M and GS have learned how to control dynamics to deliver the Patris, fillii et Spiritius Sancti of performance, handling and luxury. Hybrid versions of these cars seriously blunt the excellence, and it’s a damn shame.

Mitsubishi dubbed their flagship, the Dignity, to denote

“…the English to describe the peerless grandeur and majestic stateliness of the model…”

at least they’ve got a good starting point – the China-only Infiniti M35h LWB.