Our first brief test drive in the 2016 Nissan Maxima shows us a full-sized sport sedan with a well improved interior, chassis and engine performance.
It has been thoroughly redesigned, now over two inches longer and over an inch lower to the ground. It was a big hefty car before, and it still is. I don’t usually opine about styling, I leave whether its good or bad to you. But I’ll take you around it real fast with some highlights.
The front end gets the more aggressive Nissan V-Motion grille which is slowly making its way across their showroom. The headlights also get the boomerang design language with LED accents and HID main bulbs standard across the board.
At the rear the styling ovations continue with aggressively stretched tail lights with Nissan’s 4DSC logos embedded in them. This is a four-door sports car after all. And sporty is the new floating roof design appearance that Nissans are all seeming to adopt lately. It’s a gimmick, but a distinctive one at that.
Once behind the wheel the new interior feels positively cavernous. The Platinum model I tested had some very nice diamond stitched leather seats, a design theme more often only found in more expensive cars.
All through the new cabin you’ll find high quality soft trims, many with accent stitching that raise the bar quite a bit visually. The steering wheel has a flat bottom and even paddle shifters in the SR model, again because this is a sports car.
It’s a comfortable place to be, though because of its size you do sit down in the Maxima instead of on it. Shorter drivers I might suggest take a good drive to make sure they can see well enough out. For me at just under 6-feet tall the view outward was mostly ok, except for the blind spots out back.
Powering the new Maxima is a thoroughly massaged version of the 3.5 liter VQ series V6 which is now up to 300 horsepower. Its a gem of an engine that’s got gobs of smooth refined power, and a sound that is much improved over the previous version. It’s so good it made the Wards 10 Best Engines list this year.
What’s not so great is the continuously variable transmission Nissan continues for ram down our throats. They call it Xtronic. They extol its virtues, its simulated shift points, and its sport mode. The paddle shifters in the SR let you play with it like a real transmission.
The problem is, no matter now you play this electric piano, it still isn’t a real piano. If you want to make pure and acoustic music with this car, you’re going to be very disappointed. Why can’t they just give us a real transmission and stop this CVT madness.
Moving on, the chassis and handling does rescue this car for most day to day driving. It feels heavy and solid, the damping and springing nice and firm, and the steering reasonably well connected. The drive feels of quality and while its weight is ever there, you can toss it around on a windy back road with confidence.
So what’s the takeaway here? The 2016 Nissan Maxima has a great new interior, an awesome new engine, and a chassis that likes to play if you can live with its CVT. At about $40,000 fully loaded like our Platinum tester was I think you’ll either need to really love its style or be a Nissan loyalist to not want to shop around first.
