Once upon a time, a decade or two ago, Infiniti carved out a niche for itself as the Japanese equivalent of BMW — purveyors of luxury cars with a little added driving fun when compared to the domestic competition. But much as BMW seems to have lost the plot with many of its mainstream models, Infiniti has strayed from that path to court more mainstream buyers with a more sedate blend of driving characteristics.
In the case of the QX55, that means a turbocharged inline-four, a continuously variable automatic transmission and all-wheel-drive. The power output is adequate enough — 268 horses and 280 lb-ft — but the delivery leaves plenty to be desired. The clever variable compression system takes a beat to shift from efficient to max power, the turbocharger takes a beat to spool up, and the CVT takes a beat to do, well, whatever you ask of it; add up all those beats, and it feels like there's a loose connection between your right foot and the car, with inputs always taking a bit longer than you'd expect. It's a long way from involving — but for buyers who rarely use more than 40 percent of the gas pedal travel and switch on cruise control early and often, it'll probably go unnoticed.
Likewise, anyone who expects it to handle like the Mercedes-AMG GLC63 S Coupe it resembles will be sorely disappointed when the first turn comes. The QX55 makes no pretensions of being sporty in turns; it's happy to slide through them at normal traffic speeds, but pushing the limit brings no sense of involvement. Some of the issue, no doubt, falls to the Direct Adaptive Steering system found on my top-trim tester, which replaces the direct mechanical link between steering wheel and front tires with a drive-by-wire setup that translates your inputs into 1s and 0s and then sends them to a computer, which interprets them and tells the rest of the steering what to do. The system is certainly better than it once was — early Infinitis with it were notorious — but it's still a far cry from a conventional setup in terms of feel or feedback. Again, though: if you're driving the speed limit and using lane-keep assist all the time, odds are good you might never think twice about it.