March 28, 2024

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Infiniti has been chasing down its Lexus competitor for many years now with a product palette that closely resembles the latter. When Lexus brought out its IS Convertible in the course of 2009, it was therefore inevitable that Infiniti would soon follow suit.

We have driven this Infiniti G37 Convertible, which features, like its Lexus counterpart, the much used retractable hardtop principle first shown on the Mercedes SLK in the early 1990’s. The Infiniti version of this hardtop does indeed perform really well in its closed version. We were unfortunate in our planning that we had the Infiniti right at the time Southern California went through its most severe downpoor season in memory, which meant we were driving the car in closed version quite a lot.

In closed version it is truly a coupe like experience, a luxury coupe I might ad. The ride is comfortable, sporty, and the wind noise at the splits for the opening parts is negligible.Even at speed it remains quiet and agreeable, which means the perception of quality is very well executed.

Of course this car is made for open top driving, and so we endured a short break in the downpoor to drive open top to the snowy mountains just east of the Southland. With the cold temperatures, driving open meant for us to have the windows rolled up and the heater on aimed at the floor, so that the heat would spread through the interior, past us, on its way out. That worked perfectly for us, but if we would have put 2 mini sized people in the very small rear seat area, they would have been less fortunate. The lack of warm air and the deafening wind turbulence in that area is, like in most 4 seat convertibles, quite hair raising.

Some experimenting led us to put a snow-body-glove board propped behind the front seats, which was blocking the turbulence from reaching anymore further inward, and that did wonders. For any customer of this or similar vehicles, to have and anti-turbulence option installed when using only the front seats is very much recommended. When used in seat version, the rear passengers are always the victim. There still seems to be no practical solution found for that configuration, which might be the main reason why so few true 4-seat convertibles are produced.

Designers: Sure you all have solutions for this in your mind!!?? Show some creativity and resolve this! There might even be a patent in it.

Our experience with the Infiniti left us with a strong desire to drive it more, when the weather is much better. It is a very high quality car, with very well executed roof system and excellent quality and built. It is not a race car, but a very sporty and secure drive is definitely possible.

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1 thought on “Infiniti G37 Convertible

  1. The wind noise and turbulence got so overwhelming on my Infiniti roadster that I had to mount a good wind deflector to counter that. Had I not mounted the Windblox wind deflector, the wind noise would have surely made me deaf.

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