Road Test
Ever since Nissan rolled its latest Quest onto a turntable at the Detroit auto show in January, enthusiastic drivers whose lot in life demands their vehicles accommodate seven souls have been hoping maybe this was The One, a minivan inside which beats the heart of a sports car.
And hoping Nissan would build a Z-van was not altogether unreasonable. Just look at this thing. It's clearly styled in a similarly striking hey-look-at-me vein with its broad wheels-at-the-corners stance and exaggerated headlamps and taillights connected by an arching roofline. Its interior looks like that of an Architectural Digest concept car. The seats are trimmed to look more like high-end furniture than car buckets, and the cylindrical center console, finished in a granite-look paint, could pass as a pedestal sink in an Ian Schrager Hotel suite bathroom. All interior materials look and feel upscale, and they all match or coordinate perfectly in terms of grain, sheen, and color. If the Z-car ranks as one of the most avant-garde sports cars on the roads today, this is most certainly the trendiest, chicest minivan.
And although the Quest is built on a super-sized Altima platform, the specs reveal family ties to both the Z and the Japanese-market Skyline GT-R. The DOHC 3.5-liter V-6 engine is of course shared with the Z, although here it's tuned to send 240 horsepower and 242 pound-feet of torque to the front wheels. That's well down from the 287 horses and 274 pound-feet the 350Z sends to the rear, but it's right at the top of the class as minivans go, matching the Honda Odyssey precisely and trumping the Toyota Sienna by 10 ponies. It's also a quantum improvement over the previous Quest's puny 170-hp, two-valve V-6.
The rear suspension is similarly upgraded from a leaf-spring rigid rear axle to a multilink design shared with the Altima and directly descended from the rear-drive Skyline. Its knuckles even have holes cast for rear half-shafts that will not be used for an all-wheel-drive Quest-the spare tire lives in a well between the middle-row passengers' feet, occupying the space where a rear prop shaft would have to spin.
After we'd filled several notebook pages oohing and aahing over the delightful styling, we set out for our favorite loop of twisting and tortured pavement to see if this was indeed the Z of minivans. The two-letter answer: no.
Actually, the van steers with commendable precision and the suspension keeps the tire contact patches firmly pressed to the road for a safe and stable-feeling ride. But this new Quest is big-no, huge. Dare we say gigantic? It's roughly three to four inches longer and up to 4.2 inches taller than all the other big minivans, and it's wider than all but the Chryslers. With that size comes mass-4520 pounds of it. Only fully loaded all-wheel-drive Chryslers and the Kia Sedona weigh more. Nimbleness and agility don't come naturally to vehicles with that much inertia, and the extra weight snuffs out any power advantage that Z-motor might appear to have on paper.
Our five-speed Quest 3.5SE ran to 60 mph in 8.2 seconds and through the quarter in 16.5 at 85 mph. That's 0.3 or 0.4 second slower than the Sienna, and the Odyssey is a few 10ths quicker still. At least Nissan's six gives off a rortier snarl than others, and the Quest never felt out of breath. Base S and mid-level SL models likely weigh less, but they use a four-speed automatic, so they probably don't perform much better.
