INFINITI has spent more than a decade in the top five of J.D. Power’s luxury customer satisfaction rankings without making much noise about it. Newsweek’s readers just made the noise for them.
On July 1, INFINITI was voted No. 2 in the Best Brand Dealership Experience category of the 2026 Newsweek Readers’ Choice Awards. Nominees are selected by Newsweek’s editorial team with input from industry contributors; the final rankings reflect reader votes across multiple categories. It is the kind of third-party recognition that tends to carry more weight with skeptical consumers than anything a brand says about itself.
The result is not entirely surprising given INFINITI’s recent track record. J.D. Power ranked INFINITI retailers second among luxury brands for customer satisfaction in the purchasing process in 2024, the second consecutive year INFINITI occupied that position. More telling is the streak: 13 consecutive years in the top five of that same ranking, covering multiple product cycles and a period when the broader luxury segment was navigating significant disruption from new entrants and shifting buyer expectations.
The experience INFINITI is selling sits under the banner of Total Ownership Experience, a set of included services designed to reduce friction across the ownership lifecycle. New buyers of the 2027 QX60, QX65, and QX80 get access to MyINFINITI Expert, a personalized onboarding walkthrough that can be conducted virtually. INFINITI Premium Care, bundled with purchase or lease of any new 2026 or 2027 INFINITI vehicle, covers up to three oil changes and three tire rotations over 36 months or 22,500 miles, whichever comes first. INFINITI Valet handles pickup and delivery for service appointments at participating retailers. The MyINFINITI app provides remote vehicle commands, health monitoring, and service scheduling from a phone. Roadside assistance and courtesy vehicles round out the package, again at participating retailers.
The fine print matters: valet service operates within a 10-mile radius of the participating retailer, and availability of any given amenity can vary by location. That caveat applies broadly to dealer-network programs, where brand-level promises and individual-store execution do not always land in the same place. What the J.D. Power numbers suggest is that the gap between promise and execution is narrower at INFINITI than at most of its competitors in the luxury tier.
Separate from the award, the 2027 QX65 earned a spot on Newsweek’s Most Anticipated New Vehicles of 2026 for both the US and Canada. The QX65 is a new nameplate for INFINITI, assembled at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee plant, which has produced INFINITI vehicles since 2012. It joins the QX60 on the Cars.com American-Made Index and pushes two-thirds of the INFINITI lineup into US-assembled territory. INFINITI frames the domestic production footprint as part of a broader strategy of building where vehicles are sold, a posture that carries real commercial logic as supply chain calculus continues to shift.
The QX65 fits into what INFINITI is calling a product renaissance, a plan to bring new or refreshed vehicles to market through 2030. Where the Total Ownership Experience is about holding buyers after the sale, the QX65 is about pulling new ones in. Whether the two efforts compound each other or simply run in parallel is what the next few sales cycles will show.
Thirteen years in the top five is a streak most luxury brands would advertise loudly. INFINITI has mostly let the rankings speak. They are starting to.
Source: Infiniti. Images courtesy of Infiniti.
