Nissan Leopard J.Ferie Concept

Before we get into the concept, let’s skip ahead to 1996, the final model year for Infiniti’s finest mid-sized sports luxury sedan in North America, the J30.

Against its German rivals, the Lexus GS, and the Acura Legend, the J30 lasted four years. In Japan, where domestic automakers have wholly different timelines, the Nissan Leopard J.Ferie lasted…the same four years. 

A “failure”.

With its design locked in 1989, the concept (shown above) revealed in 1991, and the car put into production a year later, it’s clear the corporate might of Nissan backed the ‘Jour Férié (written without accents) to be a hot seller in key markets.

Holiday — they’d named it the holiday* for fuck’s sake! How could it not be a smash hit?

With a V6 engine shared with the 300ZX sports car of that era and a rear-drive chassis notoriously pleasant to drift with, on the used market, both the J30 and J.Ferie have become competition cars. (A V8 Type X trim was also offered in Japan.)

With a premium interior and low price, the car has lent itself well to customizers looking for a blank, droopy canvas: becoming a high-rider and gaining a shark fin and side pipes are two of my favourite modified J.Ferie cars.

The Infiniti J30 with shark fin and side pipes was the personal car of Harry Bradley’s, famous for sketching the first Hot Wheels cars and a highly respected instructor at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He reportedly loved his J30, and it was up for sale a few years ago — hopefully the buyer kept its period modifications as unchanged as possible.

Reading the comments, a former student identified as Chris Brown said of Bradley:

“When he would do drawing demos at a table, the students would be on the opposite side of the table from him, so he would draw everything upside down in perfect perspective, so the students would see it right side up. His other trick was to sit on a stool with his back to the chalkboard and reach backward to draw in perfect perspective without looking at what he was doing!”

In official marketing for the J30, Infiniti made a big deal about how the car was a rolling sculpture — clearly, great minds thought alike.

In the U.S., the Infiniti J30 was launched with a series of somewhat pretentious commercials featuring one of the best James Bond villains, the actor Jonathan Pryce. The writing? Not great — surely not as good as the script for Pryce’s role in the hit 1992 movie, Glengarry Glen Ross.

Still — the way Pryce delivers lines about how the J30 is built, why it has an analog clock, and its pioneering use of projector headlights (one of the premium features Nissan-Infiniti made available on this sports sedan) make me want to, at the very least, take one for a test drive.

Like his character in Glengarry Glen Ross, however…do the commercials not seem more and more desperate? 

And how they rarely show the car’s rear styling?

Years later, even Nissan is surprisingly candid about the car’s styling: “It was an unconventional high-end car with curvy styling with downwardly inclining tail that was contentious in Japan, and interior and design similar to those of British high-end cars.”