2023 Infiniti QX50 Review and Test Drive
Proving that compact luxury SUVs cannot get by on looks alone.
Jim Resnick
Review QuickTakes:
The Infiniti QX50 competes in the popular compact luxury SUV segment, where it serves the company as a cash-making cow. However, a half decade after its most recent complete redesign for the 2019 model year, it struggles to attract an audience.
To drum up interest, a new Sport trim level debuts this year. The 2023 Infiniti QX50 Sport has black exterior accents, a revised front fascia, 20-inch wheels, premium leather seats, and a 12-speaker Bose premium audio system. In addition, Infiniti adds more standard equipment to the 2023 QX50, upgrades the standard wheel design for the more affordable versions of the SUV, and makes a few other minor changes.
The QX50 is the entry-level model in the company's SUV lineup, positioned beneath the midsize three-row QX60 and large QX80. The sporty-looking Infiniti QX55 shares underpinnings with the QX50, but its rakish coupe-style roofline reduces interior room. For that, you get to pay a premium of more than $4,000, so the QX50 saves you money and adds more passenger and cargo space.
This year, 2023 Infiniti QX50 prices start in the low $40,000s for the Pure trim. The QX50 Luxe runs about $45,000, and the QX50 Sport begins at around $50,000. Sensory trim increases the price to the mid-$50,000s. Finally, the QX50 Autograph trim tops them all at nearly $60,000. All-wheel drive (AWD) is standard with Autograph trim and a $2,000 option on other QX50s. All prices include the $1,195 fee for shipping the SUV from the Aguascalientes, Mexico, factory to your local dealership.
Infiniti provided a 2023 QX50 Sport for my review, which I test-drove in Arizona. It came with optional AWD, illuminated kick plates at each door threshold, and welcome lighting, bringing the manufacturer's suggested retail price to $52,815, including the destination fee.
Jim Resnick
2023 Infiniti QX50: The Design
The QX50 can best some competitors with its more distinctive styling and accented lines that build character. I get this feeling when looking at the car from the curb and driving it. The hood's shape always frames the view forward with its bulge down the middle and sharper peaks at the wheels.
Infiniti has improved the quality of its interior materials over the past several years. The old cheap-feeling buttons and switches are entirely gone. Additionally, design work inside is at an all-time high. The QX50 shows this well in the leather quality, plastics that don't feel like plastic, and the occasional metal touch point, which is aluminum but feels like brushed stainless steel.
The QX50's instrument cluster uses conventional analog gauges for the speedometer and tachometer, and they flank a multifunction central display. The only odd bit about the instrument cluster is that Infiniti placed it lower than usual in the dashboard. So once you get all the seating and steering wheel adjustments to your liking and the driving begins, you must peer down a little lower than usual to read the gauges. By no means is this a deal breaker, but it's not the first time I've noticed this in an Infiniti.
Infiniti's placement of all the most vital controls, like those for the transmission, wipers, and hard buttons for frequently used ventilation adjustments, are easily found and well marked. The transmission lever itself, however, mimics a computer mouse. You toggle forward or backward to select gears, but it's an electronic spring-loaded lever that stays essentially put on the console. A separate park button sits on top of the lever.
Jim Resnick
The QX50's front seats provide adequate comfort and support for any drive, including long journeys where you sit in one spot for hours. Admittedly, they don't stand out as paragons of seating virtue like those in Volvos, Porsches, or old Mercedes-Benzes. Still, the front chairs do not trigger my particularly fussy opinions on seating.
The QX50's handsome profile and compact dimensions belie the fact that there's ample room inside. Of particular note, better-than-average legroom for the rear-seat occupants makes it a more hospitable place. The compact SUV class often disappoints here, partly because vehicles sharing platforms with small sedans are already shy in rear-seat room.
Two minor keys to the QX50 achieving better rear-seat room are the concave shape of the front seatbacks (giving extra knee room) and the reclining rear seatbacks. The latter isn't unique, but it nevertheless effectively increases rear headroom. However, rear occupants get their own climate controls only in the top Autograph trim.
The QX50 provides more cargo capacity than some in the class, at 31.4 cu-ft behind the rear seats and 65.1 cu-ft with the rear seats folded. However, vehicles with the available moonroof have slightly less cargo space.
Jim Resnick
2023 Infiniti QX50: The Technology
In recent years, Infiniti has improved the integration of its infotainment system in the QX50. However, it still spreads the functions over two relatively small central displays when almost every automaker has transitioned to large tablet-like screens. As a result, the QX50's system operation is a bit fussy.
For example, the only way to turn on the heated steering wheel is in a Climate sub-menu on the bottom screen rather than a more logical hard button on the wheel itself. Fortunately, the seat heating and cooling functions have dedicated buttons flanking the central display. Setting up Apple CarPlay proved easy. However, sometimes I had to unplug the cable and plug it back in to get everything to work correctly.
Voice recognition in the QX50 lags behind most of the competition. After several days with the SUV — to give it any possible advantage of machine learning embedded within the software — it still could not recognize specific proper names such as Dunkin' Donuts. Uttering a commonly confusing one like Chipotle also resulted in some interesting alternatives. In addition, the system cannot navigate to a city center. It requires a home, business, museum, or public facility with a full conventional street address to complete a voice-recognition navigation request.
Infiniti provides a full complement of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) on the QX50. These include forward-collision warning, automatic emergency braking, lane-departure warning, lane-keeping assist, active blind-spot monitoring, rear cross-traffic alert, and automatic rear braking. In addition, a surround-view camera is available.
Jim Resnick
ProPilot Assist is also standard, pairing an adaptive cruise control system with a lane-centering assist system to create a Level 2 semi-autonomous driving aid. To activate this feature, press the blue concentric-circle icon on the steering wheel and hold the steering wheel while ProPilot Assist operates.
The adaptive cruise control worked perfectly well during the evaluation drive, but the lane-keeping system could not keep up with slight curves at highway speeds. The QX50 did not track lanes well, requiring my intervention a half-dozen times over a gently curving section of highway that posted no change in speed limit. Furthermore, it hunted left to right in its lane during arrow-straight sections of the road as if it acquired, lost, and re-acquired lane lines.
The lane-departure warning alerts prompt a faint vibration in the steering wheel and emit a sound like a car horn blowing far off in the distance. However, with the somewhat firm suspension and road noise filtering into the QX50, these alerts feel masked, especially as speed increases or when driving over poor or abrasive road surfaces. As a result, the ADAS picture seems excellent on paper but did not perform well for me in real-world use.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety didn't provide an overall crash safety rating for the 2023 QX50 but did publish some individual test ratings. The Institute gave the QX50 the highest-possible Good rating on several parameters, including the original moderate front overlap test, an Acceptable overall rating for side impacts, and a top Superior rating for the standard ADAS suite in vehicle-to-vehicle front crash prevention. Meanwhile, the U.S. government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave the 2023 QX50 five out of five stars for overall crashworthiness.
Jim Resnick
2023 Infiniti QX50: The Drive
Infiniti's 268-hp, turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder makes good power. It uses a unique engineering apparatus that allows variable compression and a slight change in actual displacement, so Infiniti refers to it as a VC-Turbo, or variable compression turbo, engine. Backing up the powerplant, a continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT) sends power to the front or, in the case of my test vehicle, all four wheels.
Infiniti's compact luxury SUV accelerates briskly; Car and Driver clocked the QX50 at 6.4 seconds in the run from zero to 60 mph. But the CVT causes the engine to rise to a high rpm based on the throttle position and hold a plateau until you lift off the throttle. A CVT has no gears, so there's no conventional rise and fall or cadence to the engine noise. Instead, the CVT causes the engine to drone annoyingly for that run of acceleration.
The lazy throttle response from the engine/transmission combination flares up in transitional moments. As a result, waiting to turn left across a road into a parking lot as oncoming traffic clears becomes more challenging. Throttle input and response timing are critical with as little lag as possible, and here, the QX50 disappoints.
Any extra power or torque unleashed by the variable compression system compared to the same engine without variable compression cannot be very substantial. Plus, other automakers offer 2.0-liter turbo four-cylinder engines with similar output and without the variable-compression trickery. Therefore, I believe the funds devoted to engineering the variable-compression engine would have been better spent honing a conventional automatic transmission or an excellent dual-clutch unit rather than using the droning CVT.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rates the QX50 with AWD at 25 mpg. Over a 10-mile section of steady-speed highway driving, I did see a high of 31.1 mpg. Still, my standard 73-mile highway, suburban, and urban driving loop yielded an average of 22.7 mpg from the QX50. That's well under the EPA's combined estimate and quite disappointing, given the extra effort Infiniti put into the engine and a CVT's theoretically higher fuel efficiency.
The picture improves when it comes to ride quality. The QX50 strikes a deft balance between handling sharpness, responsiveness, and agility with the ride comfort expected of a luxury car. Infiniti must install a great deal of sound deadening in the QX50 because there's very little noise at speed from wind or from the engine compartment aside from the high-rpm droning due to the CVT. The only noticeable noise comes from the tires and suspension.
Feel for the road through the steering wheel proves adequate, but nothing that Porsche or Mazda Miata engineers should fear. The brakes perform very well in emergency stops. Still, the initial 15-20% of pedal travel has little effect. Until you acclimate to this, you find yourself hitting the brake harder as less initial response comes. As a result, you close in on a stop sign or traffic light faster than expected, which requires a heavier application of the brakes and slightly abrupt driving.
Jim Resnick
Is the 2023 Infiniti QX50 a Good SUV?
Infiniti's QX50 has a distinctive appearance that's quite attractive from some angles. It also fares well on interior design, quality, and comfort and offers better-than-average, rear-seat room and cargo capacity. The lower trim levels also enjoy a price advantage over other compact luxury SUVs.
Positives aside, I cannot ignore the downsides of the powertrain. When introduced a few years ago with real fanfare, the new VC-Turbo engine promised better fuel economy combined with great power. Real-world testing shows that it delivers neither, can sound annoying, and sometimes behaves sluggishly. Couple this with sub-par driver-assistance performance, the infotainment system's fussy menu surfing, and the poor voice recognition system, and I must acknowledge that many of the QX50's competitors pass it by.
Alternatives to this Infiniti include the Acura RDX, Alfa Romeo Stelvio, Audi Q5, BMW X3, Buick Envision Avenir, Cadillac XT4, Genesis GV70, Land Rover Discovery Sport, Land Rover Range Rover Evoque, Lexus NX, Lincoln Corsair, Mercedes-Benz GLC, Tesla Model Y, and Volvo XC60.
