Video: 2009 Nissan Maxima

And Nissan says this car returns to its four-door sports car roots and that's a title the car held through a lot of the 1990s, but has lost in more recent generations. Now, immediately you'll see that the car's styling kind of moves in the direction that, well, it's very interesting. The grill gets a little bit lower, it's flatter, it's straighter across, and the headlights have this sort of L-shape right here. We think it looks like a bit angrier Altima, but it'll probably grow on us like the previous Maxima did. Now, I think the best angle to look at the Maxima from is from the rear. This actually looks a lot better than the pictures suggest. You can see a little bit of Nissan's Altima Coupe here. I even see a little bit of Mercedes' S-Class, that's a good thing. Now, the cabin's a little bit monotonous, we wish there were a few more trim pieces here to sort of lighten things up, but overall, the quality is excellent. The dashboard has lots of soft touch panels. The leather quality in here would do fine in Nissan's Murano, which we're very impressed with, and any Infiniti model. Now, the center controls use the same design sort of out of the Infiniti G and M sedans. The navigation system actually has a lot of these shortcut buttons here. In other Nissan products that we've seen this, it's proven very helpful. We're very impressed with the size of the glove compartment, it goes way back here, but like in the Nissan Rogue, the opening kind of comes down, you can hit your passenger's shins. Can't say I'm a huge fan of the carbon fiber trim here, but you can probably get something else. Another sort of low point is the door handles. They've got this sort of painted plastic here instead of real shinier chrome door handles that you see in a lot of competitors. Now, last year's Maxima had a 255-horsepower V6, and that was already pretty fun. This year's engine has been upgraded to 290 horsepower, which should be funner still. The best news of all is the gas mileage stays about the same. We talked to some analysts who predict that full-sized cars like this are gonna be a growing segment as baby boomers move into retirement age. That definitely bodes well for Nissan. We can't say whether this car is truly gonna be one of the sportier players in the segment until we actually drive it, but for now, we like its chances. <v Narrator>For additional information on this car or any other, go to Cars.com and our blog, Kicking Tires.