Infiniti’s Bartsch on Brewing Product Storm

Some 25 years after debuting in the U.S., Nissan’s Infiniti luxury brand still hasn’t achieved the coveted Tier 1 luxury status enjoyed by the Germans.

While the brand is in the midst of a transformation to get it there, including pushing sales in other regions of the world, it still will be awhile, 1 to 4 years, before Infiniti gets the necessary product to market.

Here Michael Bartsch, vice president-Infiniti Americas, talks to WardsAuto at a New York media preview for the refreshed Q70 and Q70L sedans about the “pregnancy period” Infiniti first has to go through before it can match the Germans car-for-car, and how he can draw a comparison between where Infiniti wants to go and where his former employer, Porsche, took the brand with one classic concept.

The company is sort of evolving through some very specific tracks. The reality of this business is when you make a statement, or when you say, “Look, the Infiniti brand is at level x and we want to now take it to level y,” there is a pregnancy period before you can actually take on that larger step. And you have to expand your model range, and in order not to be a sub-brand of another brand – we were a sub-brand of Nissan for a long time and now we want to stand on our own feet – it takes a lot of commitment in terms of resources.

But more than anything it’s time. By the time you decide on a concept or a product it takes usually four or five years to get to market. And that four to five years for us hits in about 2015. The first product of that strategic decision to take Infiniti to the next level comes with the Q30 (compact car).

So in the interim you still need to do something. And in the interim what (we’re) doing is defining the DNA, the design language. And these concept vehicles are defining the design language which will cascade through all the products. You’ve seen it with the Essence (2009 sports-car concept), and you’ve seen a little bit of that built into the Q50 (sport sedan). And you’ll see already, with just a facelift with what you’re driving at the moment the Q70 (and) the Q70L you can see what Infiniti has lacked in the past, which was this definitive DNA.

We had a lot of models, but if you lined them all up, they didn’t necessarily look like they came from the same folks. They certainly had the same mother, but you wondered if they had the same father! In the future, you’ll see it’s clear we have the same mother and father, but of course with the normal little quirks that come with the fact there’s a whole lot of other genes that go behind it from various blood lines. So the concept cars are extremely important, even internally defining who we are, getting people to understand the design language we’re moving towards.

One of the best examples I can always give, and you’ll have to excuse it because it’s my close past (Bartsch was executive vice president and chief operating office for Porsche Cars North America), is think about what the 959 did for Porsche and some of those concepts. They very clearly started out as a concept-car design, and it permeated the design culture of Porsche for the next 30 years. You know we have to do it, and that’s what these concepts, these design studies do. And you’ll see the design language that comes out of that manifest itself in the top-end premium vehicles that we’ll bring to market in 2018.

It’s a very interesting, dynamic (luxury-vehicle) market at the moment. I think what’s really critical is getting your mix right. And Infiniti has an awful lot on its plate over the next two years to get the core of the business focused and sticking to the game plan. So I think we’re alright.

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