Infiniti has felt like a luxury brand that has been stuck spinning its wheels in recent years. When it first appeared in the 1990s in the U.S. Infiniti was supposed to be a competitor to rivals like Lexus, Cadillac, and even German luxury brands and always focused on offering a strong tech-filled driving experience.

Unfortunately, the brand struggled with producing strong sales and the bulk of the lineup was aging very badly in the face of ever evolving competition the last few decades. Nissan CEO Ivan Espinosa was brutally honest with his assessment of the luxury arm in a new report and revealed how he intends to correct course.

Infinti was a slow motion trainwreck

Infiniti once offered several different luxury models but in recent years, was forced to trim itself down to two models (the recently unveiled QX65 is on the way) with the QX80 and QX60 focusing exclusively on the SUV market. This move was a symptom of broader decay in Infiniti with bad marketing, decisions and slow product responses hampering the brand as a whole.

“There were many mistakes”, he revealed during an interview with Motor1. While the bulk of them were internal failures, some could be found with the product. The QX50 SUV for example was supposed to give the brand an entry-level front-wheel drive CUV which was later joined by the sportier QX55. But while the SUV was a gateway model, it failed to bring Infiniti the strong sales it envisioned before it was killed off in 2025.

The QX50’s failure also comes on Infiniti falling behind the segment in technology. Tech is a key selling point for any luxury vehicle and Infiniti’s inability to keep up in that regard also helped keep customers away with sales mostly coming from loyalists. He elaborated further stating “We did a wild bet,” “and then as the volumes were not there.” This made it difficult for the automaker to invest in the brand “because the company was not in good shape.”

Infiniti is getting The Million Dollar Man treatment

With the long lineup of problems Infiniti is currently struggling to deal with, Espinosa was also pretty blunt with how he intends to fix it and at first glance, it would seem Nissan is recreating the opening sequence from The Million Dollar Man in its attempts to make Infiniti stronger, faster, and more adept at responding to change.

The CEO revealed the brand needs at least five models to help its revitalization efforts. Three of the models will be in the SUV segment which is a safe bet since the segment is still a strong player in the profit margins of many automakers. Out of this first three, two of them will be body-on-frame SUVs with the last one being a mid-size SUV.

The fourth is the most ambitious of the bunch and will be a performance sedan that will help bring the brand back into a segment it left behind when the Q50 was axed. Not much is known about the model but Infiniti has said in the past it would be rear-wheel drive and would possibly come with a manual transmission.

it will be interesting to see how this bold push will help Infiniti grow in the long run. The brand needs new models to cover more segments and it also needs some of the fundamentals to help it maintain these strong sales after it gets customers back into the fold. If it all works out, Infiniti could become a strong comeback story for Nissan.