November 3, 2024

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Text and photos by Cor Steenstra

After seeing the flood of ads on TV for the Infiniti JX, especially the automatic stopping system when a kid with ignorant and oblivious heartless parents runs behind the Infiniti coming out of the driveway, and the automatic subtle bewilderment of the girl inside the car at why the car stopped and her dad hadn’t done that himself, we really wanted to experience that for ourselves.So all week we parked the car at unsuspecting school parking lots when school came out, and reversed when kids were running behind and not paying attention. The system worked. We didn’t manage to hit any of these annoying and loudly screaming sources of irritation, nobody was even slightly injured, of course none were taken to the hospital, and I wasn’t even cited by the ticket hungry parking lot Sheriff’s officer of the local Mission Viejo Sheriff’s office.

Darn..

All kidding aside, the Infiniti JX35 was excellent in fit and finish, and the choice of color and materials was also beyond par.

I was slightly taken aback by that weird third row seat, since it has these headrests that, when folded up form a substantial blocking of the rear view vision, which of course leads to the kinds of accidents that can only be prevented by that automatic stopping system Infiniti is pioneering. Those head rests can not slide down to an acceptable position that doesn’t interfere the field of vision. They can be flipped down, out of sight, but only to form an L shape which will not allow anyone to sit in that third row, which again renders that third row obsolete, and thus leads to storing it in the floor.

The other main irritation was probably caused by this being the 35 version, which caused this car to feel underpowered at acceleration, and in standards gear setting caused it to change gears up and down the whole time when driving in a hilly environment like we have here. In the end I had to resort to using the sport setting to get at least some sort of of normalcy in the drive.

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