The Subaru SVX World Network - Two aging personal luxury coupes...

I came out of my office at work yesterday to find a black '91 Infiniti M30 coupe parked next to my SVX. I couldn't help but take a picture and muse on the similarities and differences of the two cars.

The M30 is also a 2-door 6-cylinder engined GT touring coupe powered by Nissan's venerable VG30E V6 putting out approx. 162 hp & 180 ft/lbs. of torque into a 4-speed automatic transmission. It's RWD as opposed to the SVX's AWD or FWD, and is basically a rebadged version of Nissan's Japan-only Leopard that was added to the Infiniti lineup early on to accompany the clean-sheet-design Q45 in Infiniti showrooms. The M30 was only sold from 1990-92 and only about 12,000 were made, making it somewhat rarer than the SVX. It also came as a convertible. Like the SVX, it never sold very well. It was replaced by the odd-looking J30 sedan in 1993. All that being said, it was the closest thing we ever got in the USA to the coveted Nissan Skyline for a long time.

I worked for the local Infiniti dealership from 1991-93 and my boss had a black M30 just like this one. I never cared for it much on the occasions I drove it-- the design seemed bland and dated and aside from reasonable straight-line acceleration, it wasn't very fun to drive. We put aftermarket wheels on most of the ones we sold to try and dress them up a little, and I remember stacks and stacks of the OEM silver-painted directional alloys like the M30 in my picture has that we sold to a recycler for $5 each because no one else wanted them.

It's particularly rare to see a black M30 this nice anywhere these days. Oddly, the pearl white convertibles seem to be slightly more common in my area. I understand there are a few M30 enthusiast groups out there though and that it's not uncommon to modify them for drifting...