Driving.ca; Car Review: 2017 Nissan Maxima Platinum

by Brian Harper of www.driving.ca

Big sedans aren't as popular as they used to be, but the Nissan Maxima adds some spark to the segment

It took eight generations and some 35 years to get to the point where Nissan can make the claim its flagship Maxima four-door is “a sports car in sedan clothing” without some sort of response bordering on incredulity. The slow transition from the now painfully square, mild-mannered Datsun 810 to the robust and curvaceous 2016 Maxima has been agonizing at times, an impatient wondering as to when the company was going to build a midsize car that had as much performance as function – some European sport sedan-style zip.

Now that I’ve finally gotten around to driving one — a 2017 model in top-of-the-line Platinum trim — any thoughts of admonishing Nissan for its tardiness are banished. This version is not just sporty; it’s deceptive, with performance and handling to go with a smooth ride, plus luxury touches and premium content exceeding reasonable expectations of the Platinum’s $44,200 price tag.

But it’s the awakened performance that first grabs one’s attention. And it’s not as though Nissan went radical with the car. Under the hood is the familiar 3.5-litre VQ-series V6, only thoroughly reworked (60 per cent new parts compared with the previous engine) and now pushing out 300 horsepower and 261 lb.-ft. of torque. In truth, the engine feels stronger; the car shows distinct verve off the line when the gas pedal is given a prod.

Though I’d much prefer an automatic with a specified number of gears, there’s little complaint regarding the Maxima’s Xtronic continuously variable transmission, which seems well matched to the V6’s torque and comes with both Normal and Sport modes. Its wide gear ratio range allows for strong acceleration from a standing start, while Nissan says credit goes to the D-Step shifting logic for both the rapid shifts at full throttle and for holding the engine’s speed when hooning around corners, which allows for smooth acceleration when exiting said corners.

In Sport, zero to 100 km/h is reportedly less than six seconds — strong for a front-drive family car, if not mind-blowing. The drive mode selector not only adjusts throttle response and transmission tuning, but also steering feel and “active sound enhancement” tuning. But, while the exhaust note has some musicality to it, the engine itself is a bit coarse when under the hammer.

The other benefit to this re-engineering effort is a claimed 15 per cent increase in highway fuel economy to 7.8 L/100 km over the previous-generation Maxima; city fuel economy is rated at 11.1 L/100 km. I put 700 kilometres on the car during my week with it, the bulk of it highway cruising, and averaged 9.9 L/100 km.

While the sedan wouldn’t be my first choice for racetrack lap sessions, Nissan’s engineers clearly spent some time working under the car to imbue it with a decent measure of on-road handling. Up front is the usual strut/coil spring design, but ZF Sachs monotube dampers are added to the rear end’s independent multi-link double wishbone setup. Thick stabilizer bars are found at both ends.

Shapely and far more distinct than many of its rival sedans, the Maxima’s styling, in truth, doesn’t completely blow me away, looking over-designed with its aggressive character lines, deeply scalloped doors and “floating roof.” Yet, I do like the boldness of Nissan’s signature “V-motion” grille and boomerang-style lights. Still, Nissan’s 3.5L V6-powered Altima, which shares the same platform and pretty much all the mechanicals as the Maxima (although with 30 less horsepower), is a more cohesive design.

The Altima is also roomier, at least for back-seat passengers. While there’s tons of room up front for the tall and leggy in the Maxima, if those in the back are equally so, they’re going to find their knees jammed in the front seat back and their heads brushing the headliner.

For the rest of the article and more pictures, follow this source link below;

http://driving.ca/nissan/maxima/reviews/road-test/car-review-2017-nissan-maxima-platinum

Toyota Plans Camry Tweaks in 2014 to Extend U.S. Sales Race Lead

by  Alan Ohnsman of www.bloomberg.com

Toyota Motor Corp's Camry, headed for a 12th straight year as the best-selling U.S. car, will get “significant attention” including freshened features to hold the title a 13th year, the brand’s U.S. sales chief said.

The Camry leads its closest rival, Honda Motor Co.’s Accord, by more than 40,000 units through October this year, far ahead of Nissan Motor Co.’s Altima and Ford Motor Co.’s revamped Fusion sedan. Tighter competition in 2014, as Ford boosts Fusion production and Hyundai Motor Co. adds a reworked Sonata, doesn’t guarantee Camry will be knocked from its perch, said Bill Fay, group vice president of the Toyota brand.

“There were some who wanted to write Camry off this year, and it didn’t happen,” Fay said yesterday in an interview at the Los Angeles Auto Show. “We’ll make some effort through the collective team to keep it No. 1 next year.”

As Toyota, the world’s biggest automaker, battles Camry challengers and the best vehicles from U.S.-based competitors in a generation, the Toyota City, Japan-based company is targeting its highest U.S. sales in as long as six years. Demand for new cars and trucks, a bright spot for the U.S. economy, remains robust as the year winds down, Fay said.

Toyota rose 0.2 percent to 6,310 yen as of 10:56 a.m. in Tokyo trading. The shares have gained 58 percent this year, outperforming a 46 percent increase in Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average.

‘Doing Something’

Combined sales of Toyota, Lexus and Scion autos could total 2.25 million vehicles in 2013, Fay said. That’s up 8.2 percent from last year and the most since an all-time high of 2.62 million in 2007.

Fay declined to elaborate on changes the company is considering for the current Camry, released in 2011 as a 2012 model.

“It’s safe to say we’ll be doing something with it,” he said. “We’ll be paying significant attention to Camry next year.”

Additionally, Toyota expects to sell as many as 240,000 Prius hybrids this year, a record for the U.S., yet shy of an initial goal of 250,000 set in January by Jim Lentz, the company’s North American chief executive officer.

Easing gasoline prices have curbed hybrid demand to an extent, Fay said. A gallon of regular grade gasoline cost $3.209 on Nov. 18, compared with $3.416 a year ago, according to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge website.

“When the price of fuel gets this affordable, it makes the hybrid equation less appealing to some customers,” he said.

Toyota’s U.S. sales unit is based Torrance, California.

Source;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-20/toyota-plans-camry-tweaks-in-2014-to-extend-u-s-sales-race-lead.html

All-New Mazda 6 Finally Revealed

Nice looking car, however I've always liked the Mazda6 styling....

We’ve been very anxiously waiting for the new Mazda 6 ever since we first saw the stunning Takeri concept. The Japanese manufacturer assured people that the upcoming production version of the Takeri, the all-new 6 would retain most of its design cues, and we’re very happy to report that they weren’t lying.

After one picture leaked onto the web last night, Mazda responded by releasing an additional three, showing the car from pretty much every angle. We are really impressed with how it turned out and we say that it’s the best looking sedan revealed in a while (a few years, actually).

According to Mazda, they will be officially revealing the car live one month sooner than anticipated, not at the Paris Motor Show, but at a similar venue taking place in Moscow next month (August 29th). It will, obviously, be shown in Paris as well, but Russia will be the first country to see the new 6 in the metal.

We hope this car is as good to drive as it is to look at, as well as being very efficient, as we’ve come to expect from Mazda. We applaud their design effort, and if it will be backed up by similarly good driving dynamics (which judging by the old model, it probably will, and some), there will be no reason for anybody to want another sedan.

Source;
http://www.autoevolution.com/news/all-new-mazda-6-finally-revealed-47612.html

2013 Nissan Altima First Drive: Is being the best ever Altima good enough?

Nissan sure has done a good job with their Altima, I can't wait to see what the 2013 Honda Accord will look like in comparison (without camo)....

by Jacob Brown of www.automotive.com

What It Is
Nissan's best-selling car and last year's midsize sedan bridesmaid looks to topple the segment leaders with its stylish, innovative packaging and fun-to-drive character.
Best Thing
That 38-mpg fuel highway fuel economy number is for real.
Worst Thing
The tires may be made by high-quality, name-brand labels, but their loud, squeal-prone nature reeks of budget-brand quality.
Snap Judgment
With a lot of small tweaks, the 2013 Nissan Altima adds up to be a much better car than the one it replaces.

It used to be said that the differences from the best to the worst cars in the midsize segment were huge. That's perhaps how Japanese automakers took hold of the family sedan market in the 1990s and never looked back. But today, that's not really the case, as the class's best sellers are separated by the smallest of fractions.

With the 2013 Nissan Altima, the Japanese automaker is trying to open that gap a little. But instead of trying to revolutionize the segment with some high-flying, revolutionary car, it's chiseling away with the same basic formula that has propelled it the position of the second-best-selling car in its class. And for 2013, Nissan has made its family car even better.

Headlining the 2013 Altima is its 38-mpg highway fuel economy, a number that far surpasses its non-hybrid competition. Nissan was able to accomplish this feat by improving aerodynamics, lowering the car's weight, and re-engineering its continuously variable automatic transmission for better acceleration and fuel economy. Coupled to a 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine that's up 7 horsepower to 182, its fuel up 4 mpg in the city and 6 mpg on the highway versus the 2012 model.

Competing against stalwarts like the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, as well as other segment leaders like the Hyundai Sonata and soon-to-be-redesigned Ford Fusion, it's no longer enough for the Altima's chief selling point to be its price. The new car is plenty improved over the outgoing model, but is it improved enough to jump to the top of its class?

Walkaround

Before seeing the car in the sheetmetal, I kept tally of what some of my friends thought about the 2013 Nissan Altima. A few loved it; a few adamantly hated it. But hate isn't a bad thing; some of the world's most renown car designers have said the worst opinion of their designs would be one of neutrality, and it doesn't look like Nissan will have to worry about that. But when I saw it, it looked to me as though Nissan had struck the perfect balance between the radical Hyundai Sonata and forgettable Toyota Camry, making sure its styling would be remembered longer than 30 seconds after walking away from it.

 The 2013 Nissan Altima takes much of its looks from the 2010 Ellure concept sedan, adding softer shapes but more dramatic lines to the midsize sedan. Up front, Nissan gave the new Altima large, chrome-bordered trapezoidal grille, evocative of a samurai's robe, or so the automaker says.

It shares the same 109.3-inch wheelbase with the outgoing model, giving it a fairly sprawling stance with good proportions, like its predecessor. But thanks to raising the rear seat, it has more real-world legroom. Although its roofline is steeply raked, headroom is ample for rear-seat passengers taller than six feet. Getting into the back might take a little bit of ducking, though.

The previous Altima was happily inoffensive in addition to being cheap and reliable. And it worked, with the Altima still sitting in second place in sales behind the Camry despite its six years on the market. But this new car stirs the pot a bit, hoping to get people to notice. And like it or not, people will notice.

Sitting Down

We had the opportunity to drive just two 2013 Altimas, so we did what any enterprising car reviewers would do: We got into the bargain-basement Altima 2.5 and the 270-horsepower, absolutely loaded Altima 3.5 SL. 

 

At $22,280, including $780 for destination and handling, the base model is expected to make up a tiny fraction of sales, relegated mostly to fleet and rental car duties. But even so, it came with Bluetooth hands-free phone connectivity and Nissan's Advanced Drive-Assist information display in its gauges, nice touches to be sure. A representative later told us the most basic model probably shouldn't have been available in the introduction since it often goes overlooked, but we're glad Nissan didn't avert our eyes from the bare-bones model.

 We found controls to be straightforward and the interior to be somewhat more conservative than what we were expecting from a car with such a distinctive wrapper. In base models, the color scheme goes for grays and charcoals, with plastics that look and feel better than the outgoing model's, but not by much. That's a shame, as some competitors have both more solid-feeling interiors and higher-quality materials. But seeing as though the 2013 Altima's goal is to knock the Toyota Camry off the top of the mountain, we can report that the Nissan's interior quality feels better than its Kentucky-built rival's.

Stepping up to the V-6-powered Altima 3.5 SL, we expected some better materials. The plastics largely remained the same, but the car's beige color scheme certainly brightened up the downtrodden look. The seats came with the same ergonomically correct NASA-engineered "zero-gravity" foam underneath, but the uplevel model featured seat heaters and perforated leather.
In back, the newly raised rear seat makes it easier for even tall passengers to sit comfortably, showing that some small tweaks in packaging can make a car's usable interior space among the best in its class. Hopping from car to car, we came to appreciate the premium technology features available at each price, acknowledging that even a roughly $32,305 Altima 3.5 SL was a pretty good deal. But even in its most basic trim level, we still didn't mind the overall look, with fewer features and a rubberized steering wheel instead of the leather one that comes in all but the base, 2.5 S, and 3.5 S models. For basic transportation, the pedestrian Altima excelled at its job. We just wish the $10,000 pricier version had a little more of a "wow" factor to it.

Driving

Nissan plotted out a route in Lynchburg, Tennessee's twisty back roads, prompting us to see just what the car could do. While steering feel was generally good thanks to a new power assist system that emphasizes steering "feel," the 2013 Nissan Altima's tires didn't prove as capable during our loop. Using low rolling resistance tires in both standard 16-, or upgraded 17- or 18-inch wheel and tire packages, the Altima squealed around twists in the road. And while quiet through most of our driving, the Altima could have used better sound deadening on the coarser roads, as noise could more readily be heard than in some of the Altima's competitors, which Nissan brought for comparison.

 However, with Nissan's trick handling controlsand shock absorbers designed by German outfit ZF--the company that designs many of BMW's technologies--the Altima felt plenty competent in emergency handling situations. It just didn't sound like it. Nissan said it targeted Audis and BMWs for handling prowess; a set of tires that didn't whine like a child having to go to bed early would have completed the package.

While the low rolling-resistance tires on the 2013 Altima were our least-favorite part of the car, they helped make one of our favorite parts of it possible: fuel economy. In a 3,200-pound sedan, we were a little skeptical of Nissan's 38-mpg claim. But it didn't take long for it to make--and surpass--that number, thanks to a revised continuously variable automatic transmission. With a CVT, there is no feeling of the car changing gears; it just builds speed while engine revs remain constant. Although somewhat disconcerting at first, the Altima's lack of "shift shock" makes you think you're going a lot slower than you are until you look down at the speedometer.
Nissan says 90 percent of buyers will select the car's four-cylinder powerplant, and we don't blame anyone who does. The engine works perfectly with the transmission setup. On paper, it looks like it's lacking in horsepower versus many of its rivals, but its gearing and light weight allow it to out-accelerate its competition. And those numbers are pretty compelling in a world of ever-faster cars and ever-increasing gas prices.

Summary

Looking at the 2013 Nissan Altima next to a previous-year model, it's impossible to say that one is appreciably better than the other without a second thought. They share the same dimensions, drive mostly the same, and have the same sort of feel. But Nissan didn't set out to revolutionize the midsize sedan segment; it set out to take a good sedan and give it enough gusto to make a case for why customers should pick it over the Camrys and Accords of the world.

 Nissan didn't pick one major issue to address, partly because the Altima was already pretty good overall. Instead, it picked many, many little ones, including better engine efficiency, more technology integration, more comfortable seats, and some better interior materials. Together, it adds up to be a markedly better sedan than the one it replaces.

The Altima is never going to set the world on fire, but when you realize that Nissan is designing it to go straight for the heart of the market, it's a very good package for the money. And it should serve notice to establishment players like the Camry and Honda Accord that the Altima can no longer be simply looked at as a budget player, as it comes with more features than most of its competitors and a price tag on par with Toyota's and Honda's.

We got behind the wheel of the best-equipped and most spartan versions to see what all the Altima comes with at each price point. We're confident in saying that if we had to pick a version of the Altima for a daily driver, neither car would get our nod; that honor would go to the volume-selling Altima 2.5 S and SV models. When that chance comes, you can be sure we'll bring along the class' top-sellers to compare and see if the Nissan has what it takes to win over family sedan shoppers.

Basic Specs

Altima 2.5: 2.5-liter inline-4, continuously variable automatic transmission, front-wheel drive, 182-hp, $22,280, 27 mpg city/38 mpg hwy
Altima 3.5 SL: 3.5-liter V-6, continuously variable automatic transmission, front-wheel drive, 270-hp, $30,860, 22 mpg city/30 mpg hwy

Source;

http://www.automotive.com/nissan/altima/2013/first-drive/

Leftlane News: Next Gen Nissan Altima Spyshots

By Andrew Ganz
Monday, Nov 21st, 2011 @ 3:08 pm
Nissan’s strong-selling Altima has been a hit for the Japanese automaker since its mid-1990s debut, but a fifth-generation model is just around the corner.

Our spy braved a torrential downpour to discover a a bright red Altima sedan covered in camouflage. But despite the presence of the camo, it’s not hard to make out the new Altima’s curves.
From the rear, we can easily see that the back fenders and the tail lamps will closely mirror the larger Maxima brother. Unlike the current car, which traces much of its design to the third-generation model, the new Altima will be much less angular.
Up front, a familial tie to the recently-released Nissan Versa is evident. But where the Versa is necessarily downmarket, the Altima gets a little more playful with complex designs to its headlamps and lower light package.
The black wheels on this car are likely painted such to distract from their appearance; a black wheel trim package seems an unlikely Altima option.
We don’t know what’s under this Altima’s hood, but rumors suggest that a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder will serve as motivation for most Altimas. The current 2.5-liter four is expected to be put out to pasture, but Nissan is expected to follow in the footsteps of Toyota by keeping a V6 option for range-topping models. Hyundai and General Motors have been slicing V6s from their midsize sedan lineups.
Putting the turbo four’s power to the front wheels will be a new CVT, which has been reengineered to deliver better fuel economy and a higher level of refinement.
A version of the 2.5-liter four is expected to show up alongside an electric motor for a homegrown hybrid inspired by the Infiniti M Hybrid. The last Altima Hybrid was a limited-market model built using Toyota’s hybrid technology and it was discontinued for the 2012 model year.
Look for the new Altima to debut at the New York International Auto Show in early April before going on sale by the end of the summer. The current Altima coupe will likely stay on for another year before being redesigned in an effort to become more emotional and evocative.

Source (with more pic's);

http://www.leftlanenews.com/nissan-altima-sedan-2013.html

WoodysCarSite Find: Next Gen Nissan Maxima?

With the exception of the current Maxima, I have always been a fan, I love how these cars drive and I have even heard that when Honda looks at their Accord, they always look to see what the Maxima is doing....
Source;
http://www.woodyscarsite.com/2011/05/next-nissan-maxima-teana.html

Next Generation Toyota Camry Expected this Fall

America’s best-selling passenger car will be getting a makeover this fall, a new report finds. Sources say Toyota will launch an all-new, seventh-generation of its Camry sedan by the end of 2011.

The Camry was once again America’s best-selling passenger car last year – tallying 327,804 sales – but newer rivals are starting to nip at the five year old sedan’s heels. Those 327,804 sales were the Camry’s lowest since 1994.

However, help is on the way in the form of the all-new, seventh-generation Camry, due out later this year.

“We haven’t announced the next-gen Camry, (but) I will tell you (the current) Camry is very close to the end of its lifecycle, and a fall introduction is a pretty good educated guess,” Bob Carter, Toyota group vice president and general manager, told Ward’s.

Carter didn’t comment on what to expect from the next-generation Camry, but it’s possible we could see the new version of the sales leader at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

Source;
http://www.leftlanenews.com/new-toyota-camry-to-bow-this-fall.html