Altima engineers have evidently been sitting with the cool kids in the Infiniti lunchroom, because the car's refinement and quiet seems more in keeping with a model from Nissan's luxury brand.
So Jaguar has largely succeeded in building what it set out to build: a quick, agile car with refinement and luxury, expressed in the idiom of the company's great designs, but built with the efficiency demanded by the overlords at Ford.
Mr. Ulrich is particularly impressed with the fit and finish of the 2013 Altima, as he writes: Altima engineers have evidently been sitting with the cool kids in the Infiniti lunchroom, because the car's refinement and quiet seems more in keeping with a model from Nissan's luxury brand.
"The all-season tires led to trade-offs in the car's overall refinement".
If you ask the brand mandarins of the Premier Automotive Group, the Ford Motor Company subsidiary responsible for Jaguar, they say something like: "Jaguars are fast, sexy cars with luxury, refinement and excellent ride and handling".
But while the Kia can't match the Mazda's handling or the Civic Si's high-revving refinement, those cars can run into the mid-$20,000s, a whole league above the Forte.
Both cars felt as though the engineers had clung too proudly to Ferrari's racing pedigree – as if, for all their refinement, the cars demanded to be driven at track speed, complaining impatiently, with growling engines, when a nervous driver like me dawdled, barely reaching 50 miles an hour.
Delightfully light-to-the-touch controls and 4-cylinder engines with electric-motor smoothness became hallmarks of cars like the Honda Civic, which elevated refinement in a mainstream small car to an art form.
The Scuderia, the California and even the Italia were cars with whose development and refinement I was involved - they were all great cars that were fun to drive.
