Nissan Maxima 250 ST-L 2012 Review

Price Guide (recommended price before statutory & delivery charges): $33,990
Options fitted to test car (not included in above price): Nil
Crash rating: Untested
Fuel: 91 RON ULP
Claimed fuel economy (L/100km): 9.5
CO2 emissions (g/km): 226
Also consider: Honda Accord Euro, Toyota Aurion, Mazda6

Nissan’s recent launch of the Almera may well have served the purpose of drawing eyes to the tiny sedan’s bigger sibling, the Maxima, from which it’s drawn more than the odd styling cue. That’s quite a vote of confidence in a design that’s now about five years old.

Nissan’s biggish front-drive sedan is a bit of a fleet-segment sleeper, a market stalwart that leaves the noise and excitement to others. At around 1500 units a year, sales have been unexciting but sufficient for Nissan to keep serving up this generous tract of rolling real estate, nicely screwed together and well equipped with a value equation that should catch more eyes than it does.

The Maxima is cleverly packaged for the way it straddles the ground between medium (Camry, Accord) and large (Commodore, Falcon) segments. In the important area of rear seat legroom, it feels more large than medium. And in the manner of some lower-end large cars, it feels a bit crude and underdone in some ways, starting with the quality of some of the interior plastics.

While the exterior hasn’t drawn gasps of delight from aesthetes, it’s worth noting that it’s kept its currency remarkably well. That counts for a lot in a vehicle pitched more on function than form, and in a marketplace where high competition in the new car sector has taken its toll on used car values.

Our base 250 ST-L tester proved you get a lot of car for your $33,990 plus ORCs: 17-inch alloys, with a full-sized steel spare, keyless entry and start, auto headlamps with wipers and xenon low beams, foglamps front and rear and electric front seats with lumbar adjustment for the driver.

One place it shows its age, however, is in its audio package. The in-dash 6-CD stacker is kind of nice, but it’s yesterday’s news. Where are the USB port and the Bluetooth streaming to go with the phone connectivity? You have to step up a spec for those.

Other things it could do with include reach adjustment on the steering column and parking beepers – visibility is generally good, but there’s a lot of rear end being manoeuvred into spots when you’re reverse parking.

While the seats are big and comfy in the backrests, an extra inch or two under the thighs would be a nice thing. It has the room for it. And while rear seat space is generally very good, that raked turret takes its toll on headroom. Things are taxi-spartan back there – you get the room, you get ventilation, but that’s about it. No door pockets or 12V outlet, for example.

Cargo and cabin storage are a mixed bag. Open the bootlid and you find a big, flat-floored tract of space, unfortunately not supplemented with split-fold seats. The centre console and glovebox offer decent storage, but the door pockets are mingy – you can barely get a wallet in there, never mind a buddy of Zero.

At 2.5-litres, the base Maxima's V6 is small for car of its footprint. But it’s helped by a couple of factors: firstly, the car is relatively light (for its size) at just over 1500kg; secondly, it uses a CVT gearbox, which absorbs off-the-mark punch then feeds power and torque back with such silky, linear smoothness as to disguise its performance characteristics.

At 134kW/228Nm, it’s modest on paper, yet, while it’s no freeway stormer, nor does it feel conspicuously slow. With its signature Nissan V6 gruffness, it hints at a sprightliness. While Nissan isn’t forthcoming with performance numbers, we found it plenty fast enough for the urban commute.

And if you need more muscle, another $4K gets you into the 350 ST-S, whose 3.5-litre V6 serves up 185kW/326Nm – 38 per cent more power and 42 per cent more torque.

Nissan has given the transmission a mock-manual mode with six virtual gears – fixed points on the CVT sliding scale, accessible via the +/- shift setting. But this is a car clearly skewed towards smooth, set-and-forget driving. And that’s pretty much what happens – it’s a fair bet most buyers will toy with the manual mode for a day or two after taking delivery, then forget it’s even there.

One of the main rationales behind CVTs is fuel economy, so it came as a bit of a disappointment that a car with so much pushing it towards a decent consumption figure – light weight, small engine – struggled to make 15L/100km during our urban week, against an official urban figure of 12.7 (and 9.5 combined).

On ride and handling, the first pointer to what you’re in for when you climb in is in the old-school American-style foot-operated park brake. The Maxima soon reveals itself to be quite the American old-school ride proposition, with gym-ball suspension calibrated to soften potholes, and steering more interested in entering parking spots at 2km/h than corners at speed. It’s made for comfy urban barge work.

Nissan knows the horses-for-courses business like few other brands, as evidenced by the extraordinary diversity of its line-up. One badge sits on a range stretching from the huge Patrol to the tiny Micra, from radical eye-catchers like the Juke or the Cube and the high-strung GT-R to, well, this.

In the Maxima, the emphasis is above all on value. So while it doesn’t feel all that sophisticated and there are a couple of holes in the equipment list, just look at all that space to take five people and their gear in comfort, still reasonable kit for the money. Not a lot to complain about there.

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