2009 Infiniti G37 Convertible - Styling Review

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The 2009 Infiniti G37 Convertible is the rarest of folding hardtops: It gets almost all of its coupe-like lines right, while turning itself into an origami swan when the top’s down.

Infiniti receives a lot of praise for the design of the current G37 sedan and coupe. Reviewers across the Web are surprised that the G37 Convertible is as beautiful as those cars, despite the engineering process that turns it into a sun-driven four-seater. “Designed from the beginning to be a convertible, it’s an inch wider than the G37 coupe and completely new from the windshield back, even if you’d be hard-pressed to tell with the top up,” Leftlane News reports. The elegance of the design is planned, they conclude: “Designers and engineers worked closely to develop a rear deck design that encloses a three-piece folding steel roof without ungainly body proportions and at the same time retains a coupe-like profile when the top is raised.” Autoblog points out the “seamless transition from coupe to convertible,” and explains how clever engineering avoids the typical folding-hardtop pitfalls: “The trunk doesn't bulge upwards like the visually-challenged Volkswagen Eos thanks to a completely redesigned rear suspension.” Jalopnik agrees—“Top up, it's hard to tell it’s not a coupe…Top down and you have something even prettier”—and Automobile makes it unanimous when it declares Infiniti “has created a hardtop convertible G37 that has lost almost none of its elegant coupe sibling's visual appeal.”

While the exterior gets raves, the G37 Convertible’s cabin (shared mostly with the Coupe) wins over more converts. Edmunds loves the "user-friendly controls" and "handsome design," while Car and Driver deems the interior "pleasant enough." Cars.com also feels that the interior of the Infiniti G37 "is a vast improvement over the first-generation G35, and now features such novelties as aluminum trim modeled after Japanese Washi paper." Rounding out the praise of the interior, Edmunds says “soft-touch surfaces throughout the cabin transmit a sense of luxury” and explains the choices of matte aluminum trim “dubbed ‘Silk Obi’ by Infiniti's marketing folks,” or “a stand-alone African rosewood option” for the interior. Leftlane News states simply, the “G37 Convertible fits like a custom glove.”