Chase Infiniti: The Global High-Speed Absurdity of Clinging to a Dying Luxury Brand

Chase Infiniti: When the Pursuit of Luxury Becomes a Global Blood Sport
By Diego V. Ramírez, International Correspondent, somewhere between a Geneva motor show and a Dubai valet queue

Somewhere on the A6 outside Frankfurt, a man in rimless glasses is doing 260 km/h in a graphite-colored Q50 Red Sport 400. Behind him, an unmarked BMW 530d driven by a bored German fiscal-crime detective keeps a polite two-second gap—proof that even Teutonic law enforcement respects horsepower. The chase, live-streamed on TikTok by a passenger who has since monetized the clip into a modest crypto fortune, is merely the latest episode in what international analysts are calling “Chase Infiniti”: the worldwide scramble for the last remaining drops of brand prestige that Japan’s most confused luxury marque still secretes.

Infiniti—Nissan’s answer to a question nobody asked outside North America—has spent three decades perfecting the art of being almost relevant. Now, with parent company Renault-Nissan still coughing up the Ghosn-era asbestos, and the planet pivoting to battery pods designed by people who wear the same black T-shirt every day, the brand has become a strange sort of geopolitical Rorschach test. From the neon canyons of Shanghai to the sand-swept boulevards of Riyadh, owning an Infiniti has morphed from “I couldn’t quite afford the Lexus” to “I am actively laundering sentimentality for early-2000s excess.” Governments notice these things.

In Russia, where Western sanctions have turned the car market into a barter economy of iPhones and birch plywood, a low-mileage FX35 now trades for the equivalent of a downtown Moscow parking space—roughly the GDP of Moldova. Across the Black Sea, Turkish exporters run midnight convoys of second-hand QX80s into the Caucasus, each SUV stuffed with enough cigarettes to qualify as a mobile tobacconist. The vehicles themselves are merely the Trojan horse; the real currency is the lingering aura of a pre-woke, V8-powered universe where climate change was still politely theoretical.

Meanwhile, in the United States—Infiniti’s original hostage market—dealerships that once sprawled across suburban acreage now resemble pop-up Halloween stores: here today, hawking last year’s QX60 for 0% APR, gone tomorrow, probably replaced by yet another Amazon fulfillment center staffed by people who will never afford the products they ship. American consumers, ever the romantics, have moved on to 900-horsepower electric trucks that can tow a lunar module but will spend 90% of their lives idling in a Chick-fil-A queue. The Q50, once marketed as a “four-door sports car,” now competes mainly with Uber Black Camrys for the privilege of hauling drunk consultants home from airports named after the very politicians who gutted public transit.

The Chinese, never ones to miss an existential fire sale, have stepped in with characteristic subtlety. State-owned Dongfeng Yulon has begun rebadging leftover Infiniti platforms as “Venucia-M” EVs, ensuring that every retired QX50 chassis finds a second life ferrying provincial apparatchiks to belt-and-road ribbon-cuttings. It’s recycling, but with the moral complexity of a Bond villain’s real-estate portfolio.

Europe, of course, pretends to be above it all. The EU’s latest emissions standards have effectively outlawed anything with an Infiniti badge unless it’s retrofitted with a hamster-wheel hybrid system and a public apology. Yet in the underground garages of Brussels, one can still spot the occasional left-hand-drive Q60 coupe, usually registered in Luxembourg to a shell company whose mailing address is a fax machine in a strip-mall nail salon. Bureaucrats call it “regulatory arbitrage.” Everyone else calls it Tuesday.

And so the chase continues, lap after lap, continent after continent. It is no longer about cars, really; it is about the narratives we bolt onto sheet metal: freedom, status, rebellion, ecological penance. The Infiniti logo—an abstract horizon that looks suspiciously like a stock-market crash chart—is simply the hood ornament for late-capitalist anxiety. Someday, when the last QX80 has been cannibalized for battery trays and the final dealership sign is sold for scrap, historians will note that “Chase Infiniti” was never about catching up. It was about outrunning the suspicion that we were already bankrupt—financially, morally, and probably also on our extended warranty.

Drive safely, comrades. The road is shrinking, and the repo man now carries a tow drone.