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Infiniti's current advertising spots begin with a Shodo brush stroke of a car silhouette, the designer's first representation of how a new car will look. With the IPL -- Infiniti Performance Line -- the brand puts figurative pen to paper and begins to sketch out a new, high-performance sub-brand. In creating the IPL, Infiniti is following well-established practice in the luxury-car arena. All of its major rivals already have a family of extra-sporty variants: M for BMW, AMG for Mercedes-Benz, S and RS for Audi, the V-series for Cadillac, and the nascent F models for Lexus. Given its comparatively small global sales footprint, however, Infiniti is starting small -- as a package, the IPL G Coupe is a considerably more modest effort than any of those specialty machines.

"America," Henry Ford once said, "is a gorgeous, vast, and monumentally impressive kind of place. Now hold my beer while I build an industry that'll let us crap it all up."