First Drive Review
The Irish wit Oscar Wilde once postulated: “Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” While Oscar faced his own obstacles with deception and Victorian-era romantic restrictions, Infiniti is making a better go of it with the 2017 Q30. For if to deceive is to romance, then the lyin’ Q30 is a four-wheeled lothario.
Two deceptions right off the bat: First, the Q30 resembles a crossover, which it is not. Also, it’s an Infiniti, which it isn’t either, exactly. At heart, it’s a rebadged Mercedes-Benz GLA, but to varying degrees and to good effect, Infiniti has put a lot of work into differentiating its potato-shaped thing from Benz’s potato-shaped thing, meaning the narrative heard ’round the internet, that this is just a Mercedes knockoff, is not wholly accurate. The Q30 is its own odd animal, and therein lies some of its appeal.
The tall hatchback body and 7.5 inches of ground clearance imply a crossover, but it will only be front-wheel drive in the U.S. Four-wheel drive is restricted to European models—the Q30 we drove was so equipped—but will be standard on the QX30, a Q30 “crossover” version with more body cladding and ground clearance.
Next to the sun’s surface and Miranda Kerr, few things at this very second are quite as hot as compact luxury crossovers, and Infiniti is late to the party. But the Q30’s design is beguiling, with sharp creases, powerful curves, and muscular proportions.
Leveraging parent company Renault-Nissan’s technical partnership with Daimler, Infiniti plucks from the GLA the Q30’s most significant components, namely its turbo four-cylinder, seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission, suspension hardware, and 106.3-inch wheelbase. Infiniti didn’t make much effort to hide the car’s roots in press presentations, but the brand applies its own tune to the springs, shocks, bushings, throttle response, shift mapping, and electrically assisted steering.
The interior is unfiltered Infiniti, pleasantly richer than the GLA’s decidedly entry-level innards but just as tight for four adults. The window switches, steering-wheel buttons, door-mounted power-seat controls, and the steering-column stalks stand out as the only visible Benz components. Infiniti’s own seven-inch touch screen crowns the center stack. Chief vehicle engineer Grahame Cornforth describes the screen’s integration with Mercedes’ proprietary electronics platform as having been a colossal undertaking. We’d describe it as worthwhile, especially the work that went into making sure the diagnostic equipment at Infiniti’s dealerships can play doctor with the Q30’s German electronics.
Three Q30 variants will be offered. The first two, base and Premium, will prioritize comfort and luxury. We sampled the third, dubbed Sport, which is lowered by 0.6 inch and rides on 7-percent-stiffer springs. Even slouching slightly, the Sport still rises to near-crossover height, its roof just 1.9 inches shy of a GLA250’s. Weighing around 3400 pounds, this European-market four-wheel-drive Q30 Sport doesn’t promise huge speed, especially with its 208-hp Mercedes engine. Even so, it darted smartly in and out of traffic around our Lisbon, Portugal, drive venue.
More memorable is what fine dance partners the turbocharged engine and the dual-clutch automatic make. Mercedes tunes these same mechanical components to be lazy. The long-travel throttle pedal in the GLA requires sharp prods to wake up the pistons, and the slurred gearchanges fall well short of delivering on the dual-clutch transmission’s promise of quick shifts. In the Infiniti, even the slightest throttle inputs exact linear and strident responses, and shifts are crisp and smooth. Leaps from stationary lanes to gaps in an adjacent artery are lag-free and confident, the only hitch being the blind spots created by the big rear pillars.
Tracing Portugal’s coast away from the city, the roads become narrow, twisting, undulating, and broken. Here the Q30 couldn’t hide its firm suspension, although specific shock valving mitigates the crashing sensations we’ve felt in the just-as-tightly-sprung Mercedes. Even on roads that don’t produce repeated trips to the bump-stops, there is plenty of sharp vertical motion over the sorts of surfaces most Americans traverse daily, no doubt aggravated by the Sport model’s 19-inch wheels.
Infiniti wraps those rims in run-flat summer tires, and the relatively high impression of grip is mostly attributable to this V-rated rubber and the uncommon mixture of tall seating and a flat cornering attitude. Helping keep the body level are rebound springs in the dampers, which work against the inside wheels’ inclination to droop on turn-in. The dynamic highlights end there, however. Cranked 5 degrees or 35 degrees, at more or less any speed, the electrically boosted steering has weighting that remains robotically constant through a turn, and there is no feedback. The handling errs toward understeer, the lifeless steering but nicely firm brakes merely tools with which to adjust its severity in fast driving. The four-wheel drive is pitched as an all-weather traction device that prioritizes the front axle most of the time—and not as something to encourage sideways Scandinavian flicks. Mimicking a crossover when parked, the Q30 does a mighty convincing impression of one when in motion, too. Perhaps the front-drive Q30, lighter by 150 pounds, will have more spark. But it’s clear from talking to Infiniti that it expects the QX30 to outsell the Q30 in the U.S. Both 30s go on sale here in mid-2016.
The non-Sports’ more comfortable suspension setup, we predict, will be the go-to trim. We’d also say buyers want four-wheel drive, but the frequency with which we spot Ford Escapes in Michigan with empty rear-differential carriers implies that four driven wheels matter less than the appearance of four driven wheels.
As with most not-quite-cars/not-quite-trucks, serious drivers may want something more focused. For everyone else, the Q30’s coy charade as neither a Benz nor a crossover works to give Infiniti showrooms something different, something with a little, um, romance.
