There are auto shows, and then there’s the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance luxury car show held in beautiful California, and I think just by looking at the names you can tell the difference between the two.
Nissan certainly knows the difference, which is why they chose the Pebble Beach show to debut a concept for their new Infiniti JX crossover, the first luxury CUV for Nissan’s luxury brand.
Planned for the spring of 2012, the JX will be a seven-seat crossover and will be assembled in Smyrna, Tennessee. Considering that literally every other Infiniti vehicle is currently put together in Japan, that’s a huge win for American manufacturing, and we haven’t even started talking yet about how sweet the vehicle itself is going to be.
With crossovers becoming so popular, every automaker in the world has something crossover-ish to offer, but what separates the JX from the field is its large cargo area. Nissan is claiming that it will be the most spacious luxury CUV on the market when it hits lots in 2012, and if that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine this vehicle not succeeding.
According to Ben Poore, vice president of Infiniti Americas, “The three-row luxury crossover segment is one of the fastest-growing among all luxury vehicle segments, providing a huge opportunity for Infiniti, and like every segment Infiniti enters, we plan to shake up the status quo with a vehicle that is guaranteed to … become the new benchmark for style, hospitality, roominess, advanced telematics and safety technologies.”
What safety tech are we talking about here? It will offer all of the standard stuff, but what’s really interesting is the Backup Collision intervention, which detects objects (or people) crossing behind the vehicle while in reverse and automatically applies the brakes when necessary. Pretty cool, right?
On top of everything else, the concept on display at Pebble Beach looks impressive, too. Any Delray Nissan dealer will tell you that the first thing customers consider when perusing around a lot is what the car looks like, and this thing is a beauty. Of course, it would have to be in order to be part of the Concours d’Elegance. Anything less would be uncivilized.
