Beautifully flawed: Frank Lloyd Wright builds a high-powered crossover.

BY DAVID GLUCKMAN, PHOTOGRAPHY BY PATRICK M. HOEY, JORDAN BROWN, DAVID GLUCKMAN, ERIK JOHNSON, AND JON YANCA
December 2009


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Frank Lloyd Wright was a unique architect, yes, but he was also a popular one. His work is spread across the country in the form of homes, office buildings, and even a couple of skyscrapers. Beautiful stuff, all of it, but quirky. If Frank were around today and designing crossover SUVs instead of edifices, he might have come up with something like our Infiniti FX.

Its design being more Guggenheim Museum than Taliesin, the FX would most certainly have come at the end of Wright’s design career. When our long-term Infiniti FX50S arrived, we were enamored of its looks and proud of ourselves for choosing pearl-white paint. Especially in this hue, the high-powered wagon on stilts has presence; nothing on the road looks remotely similar. Even toward the end of its 40,000-mile tenure, the FX continued to attract stares from admiring—and perplexed—motorists.

But like a Frank Lloyd Wright creation, the FX had its peculiarities. Some staffers found them endearing, others found them plain annoying. Chief among our gripes were an overly harsh adaptive suspension that, to be fair, had some substantial 21-inch wheels to contend with, as well as a throttle pedal that required a robot-accurate ankle to control smoothly. No one, however, complained about the 390-hp 5.0-liter’s V-8 bark. We can’t knock the FX50S for its performance. Our end-of-test numbers match almost identically those gathered when the FX was fresh. The 0-to-60-mph time held the line at a respectable 5.1 seconds; the quarter-mile and skidpad statistics were also unchanged. Acceleration past 60 mph improved by 0.1 second to 100 and 0.2 second to 130—this in spite of our feeling that the seven-speed automatic transmission had become harder-shifting and at times obstinate over the course of the test.

An Attractive Interior Lacking Only in Volume

Wright had a habit of designing homes, offices, and furnishings that looked spectacular but were functionally less so. The client’s comfort was not his priority, to which he admitted, saying, “I have been black-and-blue in some spot, somewhere, almost all my life from too-intimate contacts with my own furniture.” Several of us had the opportunity to get intimate with the FX on road trips. The seats themselves were fine on long hauls, but a few staffers—from the very tall to the shortest—complained of leg and knee pain due to a cramped driver’s footwell that left no comfortable place to rest a right leg during cruise-controlled freeway stints.

Cramped also described the cargo area. Numerous logbook entries praised the FX for its ability to swallow the gear of two people, with one couple driving all the way to California and back in reported comfort. But few attempted to keep their gear confined solely to the paltry 25 cubic feet situated below the sloping rear hatch, spilling belongings into the rear seats. Wright apparently wasn’t a big proponent of storage space, either, choosing to maximize living space in his Usonian homes by forgoing closets.

Big Brother, a Trailer Hitch, and Lots of Luxuries

Wright was also a control freak. It has been said that he did not allow the interiors he designed to be rearranged. The FX is a sort of control freak, too, but thankfully, Infiniti empowers the driver to turn off all of its electro-nanny items. This is one place where Wright’s design would have differed, no doubt, but we think he would have skipped the $2900 Technology package—laser cruise control, lane-departure warning and prevention, intelligent brake assist—altogether, as he is quoted as saying, “If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the pushbutton finger.” We couldn’t agree more.

To preserve the rear end’s stylish lines, we surmise, Infiniti tucked the FX’s hitch receiver so far under the rear bumper that we needed to install an extension to make it work with a hitch-mounted bike rack. We did find that towing something—but not something huge, as the FX is rated for 3500 pounds—was a good way to smooth out the throttle’s jumpiness. The big side mirrors were towing-friendly (for, as one logbook commenter put it, the minuscule number of owners who will ever hitch a trailer to their FX)....