You will have to Wait a Little Longer for the Infiniti Eau Rouge

In an effort to be in line with all other brands on the market Infiniti had announced its plans to enter the luxury performance realm with a new trim level on the Q50 called the Eau Rouge.  This version of the Q50 will be powered by the same 3.8-liter twin-turbocharged engine that is found in the Nissan GT-R to give amazing performance.  Not only will this car offer this amazing power but it will have four-wheel drive to allow the car to grip the road at all speeds, which would give Infiniti performance model that is made to go against the M3 and M4 of BMW.

As much as this would be a fantastic car to drive it appears Infiniti has put the Eau Rouge on hold for the time being.   As the luxury brand from Nissan, which carries one of the largest lineups on the market today, you might think the brand would be capable of putting several models together at once, but much like the GT-R, the company wants to make sure it will be perfect before bringing it to market, which means it will need to have a year when no other models are being built.

Currently Infiniti is planning the release of the Q30 and Q60 and have their focus in this area on these two models.  Both of these cars are expected to be powered by a 3.0-liter twin-turbocharged engine that may bring in some good performance, but the focus with these two will be on matching some power with efficiency to give us the best of both worlds.  While we don’t know the efficiency numbers yet the power expected for the Q60 will be in the neighborhood of 400 horsepower to give us a car that is exciting to drive and able to take us quickly where we need to go.

With this power coming out of a V6 engine Infiniti plans to make this engine the one used on the Q50 as well, but it won’t be offered in place of the Eau Rouge.  With this plan in place Infiniti can offer more power to the market and be more competitive with the 3 Series from BMW while also leaving room for the GT-R engine to be placed in the Q50 to bring us a car that will be quick and decisively powerful in the form of the Eau Rouge.

While it’s easy to respect the plan of Infiniti to hold off on the release of the Eau Rouge while waiting for the car to be ready, it’s also admirable to have the performance engine plans ready for the Q30 and Q60 that may be shared with the Q50.  When will we get to see the Eau Rouge, that’s hard to say, but it should be in the next couple model years as Infiniti is poised to be a performance player in the luxury car market to challenge the long time class leaders from the German brands.