Auto News 5

The engineers at BMW's M GmbH obviously paid attention when their pre-school teachers taught the importance of sharing. After building the M5 sedan, the two-door M6 coupe, and the open-top M6 convertible, BMW extended the twin-turbo love to the M6 Gran Coupe. The regular 6-Series Gran Coupe is already a halfway point between the four-door 5 Series and two-door 6 Series, so it only makes sense for BMW to bridge the gap between the M5 and M6 with a slinky M6 Gran Coupe.

The Altima V-6 certainly provides very eager throttle response and lots of power. There's a bit of torque steer, that tug at the front wheels under hard acceleration, but it's not bothersome. I was merging onto a freeway in the Altima and the merge lane traffic didn't have much of anywhere to go due to heavy traffic in adjoining lanes, so I was in one of those situations where I either needed to brake hard and dawdle, waiting for traffic to clear, or else gun it. Naturally, I chose to gun it, and the Altima's V-6 responded without hesitation, propelling the car from 55 to 80 mph easily and sounding pretty good while it did so. Nissan, which committed to continuously variable transmissions years ago, has come a long way in its CVT engineering. I didn't even remember that the Altima had a CVT until the second day I drove it.