Video: 2016 Nissan Maxima - First Look

It's been completely redesigned, and it really does have all of kind of the swoopy design language that the concept car that proceeded it had. We're here at the Auto Show, we're gonna take you a bumper to bumper. That concept car is Nissan's sports sedan concept shown at the 2014 Detroit Auto Show. And you can see a lot sort of carries over here into the production of the Maxima. Plenty of interplay here going on in the grill, a lot of different openings here, a lot of Chrome, a lot of piano blacks. Sure to be controversial, maybe the most controversial side of the car, you come around the side here and you notice the new Maxima's a little bit lower. It's a little over an inch lower than the prior generation, but about 2.2 inches longer bumper to bumper. Now, the floating roof design, this is key here, blacked out A, B-pillars, even this kind of ring around the base of the C-pillar is blacked out, gives this sort of impression from a distance that the roof is sort of floating. We've seen that in a few other cars now, kind of a cool feature. Now there's a lot going on on the inside of the redesigned Maxima. Materials are pretty good for a premium car, as you'd expect, there's a lot of soft stuff where your arms, your elbows, your knees end up. A lot of diamond cutting in areas like the seat inserts, even in the trim, the silver trim along the dashboard, and pretty much stitching everywhere, around the shifter, alongside this center tunnel here, along the center, armrest, the upper doors, the dashboard, I think Nissan is actually trying to run the world out of thread. Now there's a center screen here in the dashboard, it's controlled through a knob here in this car at the Auto Show down here, right where your hand naturally falls, which is nice. It's also available to be controlled just by a simple touch screen so there's a nice kind of duality to it. You decide which way you wanna use it and then you kind of go with that. More storage than you'd expect for such a kind of driver oriented cockpit here. There's actually a very deep well here that you kind of don't realize how deep it is until you dig into it. Ahead of the cup holder is a nice little pocket here for your smartphone and a very deep glove compartment. However, that really swoopy styling on the outside does impact some visibility on the inside. There's just not a lot of forward visibility from the windshield rake looking around. Now the backseat room and a lot of the Maxima's competitors ranges from okay, to really generous, and I gotta say, the old Maxima was kind of more on the just okay side. This new one actually seems to have a pretty decent seating position, and leftover leg room and head room for adults back here. The Maxima has front-wheel drive in a 300 horsepower V6 that works through a continuously variable automatic transmission. Pretty familiar territory if you've driven past Maximas, which still are a lot of fun to drive despite being front-wheel drive. If you want to crack at this it goes on sale summer 2015 with a starting price, including destination, of just over $33,000. (trunk door shuts)