Buying Experience: Infiniti G35
What we won’t do for you, our faithful blog readers…
Buying CR test cars isn’t always easy. Car magazines, online publications, or newspaper reviewers simply call the manufacturer and get a press car delivered. But it’s quite another thing to have to buy (and sell) over 80 cars a year like Consumer Reports does. Since we’re often buying the first so-and-so to hit the showroom floor, it becomes a balancing act between getting the car quickly so that we can report on it and trying to get the right mix of options appropriate for our tests. After all, we don’t have time to special order cars from the factory.
Sometimes acquiring the right car can be a real hassle, as experienced by the travails of buying our latest 2007 Infiniti G35. As mentioned in our earlier “Just In” blog entry, we bought an all-wheel-drive G35x because many readers wanted to know how the previous-generation G35x performed. But to better compare the new Infiniti with the predominantly two-wheel-drive sedans in our Ratings (available to ConsumerReports.org subscribers), and to better serve our subscribers/readers who don’t live where it snows, we also wanted to test the regular rear-wheel-drive G35.
This proved to be something of a problem. Both our online inventory queries and the search attempts of various dealerships revealed that the few RWD G35s available in the Northeast were loaded G35 Sport models. As a rule of thumb, unless we’re putting together a very targeted test group of sports cars, CR tends not to buy cars equipped with “sports packages.” Such packages often include bigger summer performance tires, larger brakes, and sometimes different-tuned suspension and steering. While car magazines often test cars so-equipped, most buyers don’t opt for these packages. Because of that, CR only buys sports package-equipped sedans when it’s the only way to buy them (like the Mercedes-Benz C230) or when it’s the only way to get a certain important option (like to get stability control on a Cadillac CTS 2.8.)
So, we had to take some out-of-the-ordinary steps to buy our RWD G35 Journey. I’ll be getting on an airplane traveling South to pick up this model and will be driving back to CT over the next few days to put miles on it. I’ll let you know how the buying experience went and how the trip back to the Northeast is going, so check back soon. --Mike Quincy (with reporting by Tom Mutchler)
