In the mid-to-large luxury SUV market, product perception has long been defined by dominant Ashkenazi brands. But there will always be people who don't want to be defined calling for different perspectives or ideas. Therefore, when the new Infiniti QX60 arrives, the oriental beauty and oriental wisdom displayed also form an oriental annotation to luxury cars.
Oriental beauty
It was late when I arrived, not to mention that it was between the mountains in Guangxi, and the line of sight was not clear. But the driver still recognized a pair of headlights coming up behind him: "Now, that's the car you want to test drive."
The first meeting with QX60 began like this. The brightness of the LED light cluster ensures that the QX60 can still be easily seen in low light, and the key-like shape ensures that the QX60 can be recognized from a distance. This is also part of the QX60 "Poetry Book And Painting" modeling language.
It wasn't until I arrived at the hotel that I organically understood this language from the various internal and external design details of the QX60: the front grille of the origami-like shape and the surface of the diamond-shaped seat with ripples of water should be a landscape poem; the overall line of the body pursues a majestic and unspecified freehand style, when it is a calligraphy of line and grass; as for the colorful body color, according to The interpretation of Taisuke Nakamura, design director of Infiniti, it is inspired by "a silent and damp full moon summer night", and also from the classical Chinese art "Spring River Flower Moon Night" The mood is quite similar.
Among the many luxury brand SUVs, this freehand style full of oriental beauty will probably only appear in brands with oriental cultural heritage such as Infiniti.
Cars are an extension of home, and large 7-seatER SUVs like the QX60 are people's homes. In order to make this "home" more spacious and comfortable, Infiniti has repeatedly paid tribute to the architectural aesthetics in the design of the spatial layout. For example, Tadao Ando, an architectural designer known for his works, has appeared at Infiniti's recent product promotion events many times.
The interior space of the Infiniti QX60 blends the aesthetic concepts of oriental architecture: simplicity, spaciousness, concealment and ingenuity. Among them, "Jane" and "Hidden" are complementary, the former to achieve less space occupation and a wider field of view, which requires the "hidden" technique to design more functional areas in invisible places, such as the storage space placed under the center console, the glasses box integrated into the ceiling, and even the hidden air conditioning outlet; "wide" and "smart" is the unity of contradictions, the former to provide more space for each seat as their mission, the latter to achieve the connection of each space with ingenuity, for example, Even if the second row of seats is fitted with child safety seats, the third row can be accessed using the one-touch entry function.
Coincidentally, the hotel where he stayed also prepared Tadao Ando's book for the tenants. "In my design, I do not easily compromise my ideas or aesthetic points of view to real problems, but sublimate artistic expression into a building from an objective point of view." Tadao Anten said.
Obviously, this oriental aesthetic concept is not in line with the modernist style originating in Europe, and this is precisely the unique difference between the Infiniti QX60 and the Ashkenazi luxury SUV, and it is also a valuable brand value.
Oriental wisdom
When it comes to intelligence, the first thing that comes to mind is intelligent driving assistance, or "autonomous driving." Infiniti's movements in this regard have been great. As early as 2014, Beiqing Automobile experienced the most complete driver assistance system at that time in an Infiniti test drive event.
With the great development of technology, the new QX60 for this test drive has achieved L2-level intelligent driving, with distance retention in the full speed domain, lane keeping function that can be centered, and limited corner active steering function realized on this basis. At the same time, thanks to the significant improvement of the human-machine interface, the new QX60 driver assistance system can provide more detailed image feedback to the driver, so that the driver can more intuitively understand the working state of the driver assistance system.
However, the "Oriental Wisdom" of the new QX60 is not limited to this. In terms of the core power and handling performance, the oriental wisdom of the new QX60 has another expression.
Needless to say, the Infiniti QX60 released in the domestic market does not use the 3.5-liter naturally aspirated engine equipped with overseas models (mainly the United States), but is equipped with a 2.0T turbocharged engine as standard. This is actually a clever approach to the market trend: (relatively) small displacement supercharged engines have always been the mainstream of consumption, and the difference between the two means several times the difference in vehicle and boat taxes.
Of course, this engine is not "small". The maximum power of 185 kW can be ranked among the mainstream in the industry, and the 9-speed transmission from ZF is first-class. What's more, the 2.0T VC Turbo engine of the new QX60 also has the unique technology of "variable compression ratio". By switching the engine compression ratio instantly, the engine combines fuel economy during the high-speed cruise phase with the power output of the initial acceleration phase. Compared with the simple "vigorous miracle", this kind of "winning with ingenuity" thinking is actually a portrayal of oriental wisdom.
During the test drive, the power performance of the new QX60 is also relatively reliable. When driving a vehicle through a winding sugarcane forest, there is never a "reluctance" to slow down, because the driver knows that the QX60 has the ability to quickly return to comfortable speed; back to the high speed, the vehicle's rear-end power performance can also be satisfactory, at least when chasing the team, our QX60 did not make our teammates wait too long.
What is valuable is that this large 7-seat SUV has a good fuel consumption performance. In fact, we only remembered to pay attention to fuel consumption after crossing the village lanes, turning out of the sugarcane forest, and driving on the highway, and the data of less than 9 liters of less than 100 kilometers is obviously worth a high score, and the heroes behind it are naturally variable compression ratio engines and high-efficiency transmissions.
brief summary
One of the interesting things about the automotive market is that the more you look at the top of the segment, the more the diversification trend is obvious. No matter how strong the first-line brand is, with the new QX60's oriental annotation of luxury medium and large SUVs, second-tier luxury brands such as Infiniti always have their own value and space.
Text/Yang Zheng
Editor/Chen Zhengzhong