2023 INFINITI Q50 Reviews, Pricing & Specs

Amazingly, the 2023 Infiniti Q50’s design is now nearly ten years old. Originally launched for the 2014 model year, the Q50 replaced the incredibly successful Infiniti G Line. Considering the G’s impressive sales volume, Infiniti’s designers were up against high stakes when crafting the then-new Q50.

Luckily, those designers nailed it. The Q50 looked great in 2014 and it looks great in 2023. The aggressively shaped curves along the hood emphasize the car’s wide and low stance, but the grille—which looks downright cautious by today’s oversized design standards—keeps the styling artfully restrained. The stack of lights that adorns the front end, from the little fogs down at the bottom to the LED headlights up top, look lovely. Adding to the sense of sportiness, every Q50 also gets a little lip spoiler down below the front bumper.

Viewed in profile, Infiniti’s shaped body panels boast smooth character lines. Truly, the Q50 evokes more modern Mazda design than it does Mercedes, and that is a good thing. Our test car—the US equivalent of a Q50 Signature Edition equipped with all-wheel drive (AWD)—came fitted with 19-inch wheels and Dunlop 245/40R19 tires. Even though we’d almost always prefer a little extra sidewall, the big wheels and thin rubber on our car certainly look terrific.

Admittedly, the Q50’s design gets a little soft at the rear end. The lines that flow nicely over the front and profile sort of terminate in more bubbled styling at the back. Likewise, the taillights are uninspired, and the badging looks a bit too much like the lettering found on some Nissan models. Luckily, that will be a problem only for the folks behind you.

Inside, optional (and lovely) leather upholstery continues the feeling of refinement and style introduced by the Q50’s exterior. (Note the brown leather shown in our test car is not available in Canada. On the Signature Edition, black or stone grey are offered.) It’s obviously good quality material, and the seats are firm and supportive while still being comfortable. Our Q50 even came equipped with a grape polyphenol filter for the climate control, which is supposed to eliminate bad odours. To be sure, we didn’t receive any complaints of noxious odours during testing.

Now, being that the Infiniti Q50 hasn’t seen a real redesign since the 2014 model year, there are some shortcomings. The buttons flanking the touchscreen look and feel straight out of a 2010 vehicle. The steering wheel feels a bit small, and it doesn’t have the thick grip or heft of some more modern players (namely BMW). The driver information display sports old gauges with uninspiring designs, and the centre display screen between those gauges looks low-resolution and doesn’t offer intuitive controls. The gear shifter also feels comically large and tall next to what you’d find in an Audi A4 or a BMW 3 Series.

The Q50 competes in the crowded and cutthroat luxury sedan segment. In an era where leather seats, advanced technology, and beautiful design can be found as readily on a Kia as they can an Audi, it is performance that increasingly defines and separates luxury sedans from their mass-market counterparts.

First, the positives: the Q50 makes great power. 300 horsepower and 295-pound-feet of torque from a twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 engine help this car hustle from a stop, and it’s enough grunt to feel quick on the highway, too. Even better, those numbers explode to 400 horses and 350 lb-ft in the Infiniti Q50 Red Sport 400—we’ve driven that car, and it’s genuinely fast. Unfortunately, even without 400 horsepower, the Q50’s fuel economy hurts wallets. Our test car is Natural Resources Canada rated to return 12.5 litres per 100 kilometres city, 8.7 highway, 10.8 combined, and that’s not fun when you’re paying for premium fuel.

We were pleased to find quick and smooth shifts from the Q50’s seven-speed automatic transmission. In relaxed driving, it’s almost impossible to detect, but if you put the hammer down, you can feel the auto really fly through the gears. Our test car came fitted with AWD, which is standard in Canada. (A rear-wheel drive (RWD) version is offered in the U.S. but is not available here.) Given its impressive specs, and compared with some of the other popular options in this compact luxury sedan segment, the Q50 feels like it’s taking a fun, throwback approach to speed.

Unfortunately, things can get a bit hairy when you start to hustle the Q50 through corners. The steering feels too light and doesn’t transmit enough to the road feel, which can make the Q50 feel uninspiring on backroads and a bit too floaty on the highway. The suspension also rolls a bit too much for a sedan, as if it can’t quite keep up with the eager powertrain. In our experience, that sensation is amplified in the pumped-up twin-turbo V6 in the Red Sport 400. Without some suspension improvements, it’s hard to view the Q50 as a top-tier sports sedan.

From the front seat, the Q50 offers plenty of headroom and shoulder room, and 892 millimetres of rear-seat legroom should be plenty for most passengers. Admittedly, the Q50 doesn’t offer a ton of cargo space—382 litres in the trunk—but it’s got a slightly bigger trunk than the Audi A4 and the BMW 3 Series. You might struggle to pack enough luggage for a party of four’s weekend away, but you’d likely run into the same problem in any other compact sedan.

We were pleased with some of the Q50’s other convenient touches. Heated wing mirrors, dual-zone climate control, heated front seats, and a heated steering wheel are all included as standard features. Considering luxury automakers can be surprisingly stingy with convenience features like these, it’s good to see them included here at no extra cost.

Some of the Q50’s tech touchpoints, such as the driver information display or the centre stack’s physical buttons, can feel a bit outdated. However, neither of those idiosyncrasies can hold a candle to Infiniti’s cobbled-together approach to a modern infotainment system.

Instead of one screen, the Q50 boasts two. Positioned with one atop the other, the top screen displays navigation and, when equipped, Apple CarPlay or Android Auto. The lower screen handles essentially all of the other functions. Both are touchscreens, although there is also a rotary control knob located lower on the centre console, near the gear shifter.

Compared with the advanced tech found in Audis, BMWs, Lexus and Mercedes models, the Q50’s two-screen techno-collab is a bizarre setup, and it’s very clear that the lower screen was added as a late-arriving solution to help the Q50’s unimpressive top screen compete against the much more tech-advanced sedans dominating the luxury space.

The top screen lacks crisp resolution, and the lower screen doesn’t exactly look cutting edge. Plus, the rotary controller on the centre console works for the top screen, but not the bottom. So, is it weird? Yes. But it does have some redeeming qualities.

For one, we were relieved to find that both interfaces are touchscreens. It’s also helpful that the Q50 supports wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto—the latter requires a wire. Best of all, you can run two separate apps on these screens. Want SiriusXM satellite radio down below and Google Maps up top? You can do that. It also responds quickly and, overall, is easy to use. At first glance, this tech setup looks embarrassing and half-baked but, while it’s certainly not as polished as what you’ll find in some other cars, we did walk away from the car feeling pretty pleased with the overall experience.

As noted earlier, the Infiniti Q50 plays in a cutthroat sandbox. The competition is seemingly always improving, and no automaker can afford to rest on their laurels if they want to own the compact luxury sedan market. That extends to safety tech and driver assistance systems, where the Q50 also looks a bit short.

In Canada, adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring and intervention, and lane-departure warning are available but not standard. Forward collision warning is standard, though, as is automatic emergency braking. Even though you can equip multiple Nissan models with ProPilot Assist, there was no similar technology found on our Q50 tester. It’s not a very cutting-edge list of advanced safety tech.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not awarded an overall score to the 2023 Infiniti Q50, although it did score it five out of five stars in its rollover test. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) opted not to name the Q50 either a Top Safety Pick or a Top Safety Pick+, but it received the top “Good” score in all four crashworthiness tests.

Unless the Red Sport 400’s powertrain is just too much to pass up or the Black Opal treatment is what draws you in, we’d recommend buying an Infiniti Q50 Luxe, one step up from Canada’s entry-level Pure trim. That’s because, compared with the higher trim levels, the Luxe still comes very well equipped. It includes features such as a 16-speaker Bose premium audio system and leather upholstery, and its price tag–$49,995 before fees–is palatable in the luxury sedan segment.

Move up the ladder, and the Q50 has a hard time competing. The as-tested new car price for our Q50 Signature Edition is $56,895, not including a destination charge of $2,495 and other fees. For the Q50, that’s tough to swallow. A similar BMW 330i xDrive starts at a nearly identical price, and the same is true for a well equipped Audi A4. And if you want a deal, the front-wheel drive Acura Integra starts at just over $37,000–nearly twenty thousand dollars less than our test car.

That puts the Q50 in a bad place. It’s handsome, makes more power than those Germans, and has a smidge more cargo space too, but it falls short on handling, refinement, technology, and safety. Given the competition, we’d either opt for a BMW or Audi, or choose to save our money on an Acura.

Note: Images show a US model.