Beaverton INFINITI

My wife's been looking at the Acura TL-S and I asked her to consider the Infiniti G35 Sport (we've got growing kids, so coupes are out). The fact that I even considered an Infiniti, given our long, sorid history with our Nissan Crapsima, is a testament to how good the G looks on paper. We looked at both cars at the Portland Auto show and scheduled test drives for both. In hindsight, our experiences with the salespeople there was a harbinger of what would come. The Acura salesman was very laid back and helpful. The infiniti salespeople were helpful, but seemed arrogant and more like your stereotypical car salesmen. When my 5'5" wife sat in the back of the G37 coupe and had to cock her head to one side for lack of headroom, the salesman exclaimed, "oh, every coupe is like that". Really? Because the Honda Civic coupe isn't and that's one of their smallest cars. We knew going into our Infiniti search that it would be somewhat difficult finding what we wanted; a manual in some color other than silver, gray, or white. When we inquired about it, they assured us that what we wanted would be next to impossible to find. Given the lack of dealerships (only three in the entire Northwest) and the four-month lead time required for factory orders, we were basically stuck with whatever they had. Oh, we could have one shipped in from elsewhere, maybe, but it could cost "thousands" to do that. We live on the Eastside, so immediately after the show, we went to Portland Acura and drove a red 6spd manual Type-S (exactly what my wife wanted). I knew Acura had a $2000 dealer incentive, so I was confident we could get it for about $35k. The next day, we went over to Beaverton Infiniti. The dealership is very inconveniently located and is sandwiched between several very busy, criss-crossing roads. The roads are so bad there that they don't even let you drive off the lot. Instead, they drive you to some safe location and let you take over. It's also a very small lot, as we learned later. Compared with the royal treatment we had received at Acura, the sales experience at Beaverton Infiniti was horrible. Our salesman was too busy to deal with us, so he passed us on to someone else. Okay, that happens; no problem. The new salesman led us to a white G35 5spd auto sedan with a G35-S emblazoned on the back. Compared to the Acura, the ride was very noisy and the suspension was somewhat squishy. The headroom in the back wasn't good, either. I'm only 5' 9", but my head was brushing up against the top. I didn't experience that in either the Acura or the Civic sedan my mother just bought. In fact, it was exactly the same as the headroom in the Civic COUPE I sat in when my mom was shopping for Civics. That said, the G35's not quite as common as the TL, I like the exterior lines a bit better, the interior was maybe a little nicer than the Acura, and the seemless IPod integration was awesome (although I've since heard that the Infiniti navigation system has some odd quirks I don't think I could live with). I'd purchased an ITouch for my wife in preparation for her new car and was disappointed to find that Acura discontinued the dealer-added system this year. I looked at the window sticker of the car we were driving and was suprised to see it read "Journey". I casually asked the salesman what the difference between a Journey and Sport was. He hemmed and hawed a bit and said something about the suspension being stiffer and arms being longer, etc. I told him I didn't understand why we were in a Journey when we asked for a Sport. No response from him. When we returned, he led us into the showroom to "talk numbers". I thought we'd made it pretty clear what we wanted and the website indicated they had six or seven Sports, but he couldn't seem to find anything on his inventory sheet, which consided of some VIN numbers and MSRPs. He kept stopping on a VIN, typing it into the computer, and deciding it didn't match.