Test Drive: G35 gets your heart pumping

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Who knew it would take more than a decade to learn what that meant?

Who, indeed, knew that it came to mean a car that could wow you into transcending its foibles and flaws? Such as the 2003 G35, and now the '07 G35, with fewer foibles and flaws, more transcendence.

G35. The car with near-BMW panache, the one that accounts for one-third of the brand's U.S. sales. Because it flat goes. Did then, does now.

Along narrow roads snaking tightly up and down hills around here, the G35 could maintain, ah, brisk momentum without straying from its own traffic lane.

Remarkably, that was in the all-wheel-drive version, the G35x. AWD cars, spurred hard, often have trouble keeping their front ends from drifting. Not the G35x. The AWD, in fact, seemed to stabilize the G and help it power around with confidence. Sure, there was that exciting moment involving wet leaves across the road. But a rear-drive model wouldn't have handled it better, perhaps worse. G's AWD system can shift up to 50% of power to either end, as conditions dictate.

There was an irritant, though: the windshield pillars. Angled steeply back, they bisect the line of vision when you crank your head around to look where you're going during sharp corners. Makes it hard to properly align the car through the corners and to clearly see oncoming traffic. They also can partly obscure pedestrians on the periphery in normal driving.

On the other hand, the engine and automatic transmission are a heavenly mating. Full-throttle brings only unbroken acceleration, barely punctuated by what seem more like illusions than actual pauses for the gearbox to shift. Hard-throttle downshifts take an instant to register in the gearbox's digital brain. But when they do, they snap-to.

The interior, previously a weak spot, is sufficiently improved. Especially the center stack of controls, including an easy-to-read screen for navigation maps and other, more useful information.

The G is tight inside, same as before. Rear legroom is 2 or 3 inches shy of comfortable. And the front seat sits so close to the door panel that only thin fingers can probe between to reach the adjustment controls on the side of the seat.