Top 5 Most Beautiful Cars That Inspire Infiniti's Genius Designer

Infiniti hit a gold mine when it hired Alfonso Albaisa as its executive design director in 2013.

The Cuban-American designer creates gorgeous cars for the Japanese luxury car brand, eschewing the trend of hyper-aggressive and over-styled, angular cars for elegant, curvy designs that have a lasting appeal (except for the QX80 perhaps).

Many automakers will tell you their designs have “sensual purity,” which is a terribly over-used piece of public relations garbage. With Infiniti, however, it’s actually quite true — the designs are sophisticated and dignified with just a hint of understated sex appeal.

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With the new Q60 coupe slaying in terms of design and the lovely Infiniti QX50 Concept just debuting at the 2017 Detroit Auto Show, we had a chance to sit down with Albaisa to chat about the cars that inspire him. Here’s what he told us.

This is typically the top pick in automotive circles as the most gorgeous car in the world, so it’s not unusual to see Albaisa pick this classic design as one of his favorites. He told us that when he was a child growing up in Miami, he saw a Jaguar E-Type for the first time ever and it changed his life. He remembered how it rumbled as it drove into a pocket of sunshine and how that exact moment sparked his love of cars and design. The E-Type is the reason he designs cars today.

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American cars of this era get a lot of props from the designer crowd as well. When we spoke to Jaguar designer Ian Callum, he called out the 1965 Buick Riveria for being a huge inspiration for him. Although Albaisa likes them both, he told us he prefers the Lincoln Continental Mark 2 over the Riveria because “it had the proportions of the ’60s, but the shapes of the ’50s.” He referred to both cars as “gentlemanly.”