The styling direction Nissan has taken with two of its highest volume vehicles, last year with the 2015 Murano mid-sized crossover and now with the 2016 Maxima sedan have proven to be alluring head-turners. Even though many manufacturers are leery of taking design risks, Nissan’s vehicles, especially the new Maxima, seem to resonate giving buyers a compelling choice.
The new sedan—which is 2.2 inches longer and 1.3 inches lower than the outgoing car—features such cutting-edge touches as boomerang-style lights, a double U-shaped grille, intersecting creases, swooping character lines, blacked-out pillars, and quarter-panel flares. There’s so much going on it’s almost too much to take in on first sight, but it all seems to work as a package. The downside to taking such a design risk is that it might become quickly dated.
The interior is equally as interesting and stylish with a driver-oriented cockpit, quilted seats, contrasting stitching, a center stack angled by seven degrees toward the driver, and a flat-bottomed steering wheel.
The new sedan is designed for those buyers who are luxury intenders, but looking for a vehicle that is more sporting in both appearance and road manners. Thanks to a healthy 3.5 L V6 engine producing 300 hp and 261 lb-ft of torque with a sport-tuned (stiff) suspension in the SR trim level the Maxima adds a measure of sports sedan drama to the equation although most will probably feel more comfortable in the other, more plush-riding trim levels.
Maxima is driven through the front wheels and mated to a continuously variable transmission (CVT). Nissan has done a commendable job in advancing the CVT’s feel whether in idling around town or under pedal-to-the-metal acceleration. Nissan said they used six variables—accelerator-pedal position, road grade, acceleration and cornering g’s, road speed, and braking—in determining how the transmission behaves, and artificial gear ratio changes closely mimic the action of a conventional automatic transmission.
We were not only impressed with the performance in a week of varied driving but we had the opportunity to take the Maxima SR edition out to our usual winding rural paved-road “test track” where we were pleasantly surprised at its cornering and handling attributes. The Maxima, we discovered, is not a sports sedan, but it handles itself quite effectively when there are a lot of bends in the road. And we are impressed with the car’s EPA-rated gas mileage of 22 mpg city, 30 highway and 25 combined on premium gas.
