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Fashioning a sporty coupe from the common clay of a family sedan is a tricky business. In addition to all the usual imperatives—affordability, practicality, the need to share a platform and parts—a car company has to bake in as much style and spice as it can muster. Fortunately for Nissan, its four-door donor car is the Altima. Easily Nissan’s top-selling car around the world, the fourth-generation Altima is challenging the Mazda6 for performance honors in the family bracket.

With the front-drive Altima providing solid bones for a spin-off model, Nissan designers worked to keep the car from looking like a sedan shorn of doors. The wheelbase was shrunk by four inches and overall length by 7.1 inches. The roofline shaves another 2.5 inches. Excepting the hood, the body panels, fascia, and lighting elements are the coupe’s alone. The coupe is impressively slender, as well, at 3205 pounds with the V-6, about 150 pounds less than a Ford Mustang or Honda Accord Coupe and roughly 350 less than the corpulent Mitsubishi Eclipse.

Parked in formation at the boutique Graves 601 Hotel in Minneapolis, a row of Altima coupes made clear that the surgery was a success. This is a straightforward, handsome machine with the sort of youthful vitality that’s so important in a mass-appeal coupe. Owners will take pride in the family resemblance to the vastly more expensive Infiniti G37, even if Infiniti owners may be less appreciative.

The trade-off for smart looks and a tidy size is a stingy back seat. It proved a tough spot for anyone approaching six feet tall. Those rear 60/40 split seats do fold to expand the wide-but-shallow trunk. The cabin is pleasing and uncluttered, not as buttoned-up as that of the Accord, but no longer the plastic claptrap of the previous Altima.

Heading east out of Minneapolis toward the Wisconsin border, we first sampled an Altima 2.5 S (base price $20,490) with its 2.5-liter, 175 horsepower four-cylinder. Next up, we drove an Altima with a 3.5-liter V-6 and 270 horsepower (starting at $24,890). Those engines are carried over untouched from the sedan.

Running past freshly planted fields and assorted herds in Wisconsin dairy country, the Altima was good clean fun: sporty but pliant, comfortable and roomy up front. The coupe’s shocks and springs are mildly retuned from the sedan, but antiroll bars are the same diameter and the steering is a dead ringer as well: eager and accurate, a bit over-assisted.

The V-6 model keeps torque steer in surprising check, though whomping the gas at low speeds still sends twitches through the wheel. Both four- and six-cylinder models can be had with a trusty six-speed manual or Nissan’s latest-generation continuously variable transmission, dubbed Xtronic.

The CVT proves the biggest revelation. It’s miles ahead of the company’s previous belt-and-pulley unit, first seen in America on the Murano crossover. Where that CVT was all awkward surges and slippy-clutch feel, this one is vastly more logical and linear, more connected to your foot on the throttle. Floor the gas at 60 miles per hour, and the tranny gooses the engine to 5500 rpm, but then climbs steadily and holds at 6250. Lighter throttle applications produce expected results, rather than the engine always rushing headlong. Most impressively, the CVT’s manual mode does a credible job of mimicking a conventional six-speed transmission. It even barks the tires nicely in a first-gear launch.

The manual shifter is accurate, if a bit rubbery, but it also unleashes the mighty V-6, which pulls gratefully to nearly 7000 rpm. Nissan’s crew argued for the ratio-juggling wisdom of the CVT, but sometimes maximizing fun is more important than maximizing efficiency. For the enthusiast, there’s still no contest: the CVT rivals Audi’s for smooth operation, but the manual carries the day.

As in the sedan, the coupe gets a bit roly-poly when pushed. Body motions could be better controlled, especially the nose diving under hard braking. Yet with its shorter wheelbase and lighter weight, the coupe changes direction a bit more readily. Certainly fun to toss around, it carves corners well and maintains confident front-drive control to the limits of the tires and beyond.

In both performance and perception, a well-stuffed V-6 model does seem an especially big jump up from the basic-issue, cloth-covered four-banger—more so than in the sedan, probably because a coupe’s nature is to be faster and more indulgent than a family car. That difference is reflected in price: a 3.5 SE can crest $30,000 with a navigation system (featuring an admittedly hard-to-read touch screen), Bose audio, and all the toys. The only outright silliness is the back-up camera included with the navigation system, as extraneous as a tow hitch on this car.

In the four-cylinder’s defense, base models get a decent crop of standard features, with an intelligent key, ABS, and six air bags including side curtains. And for both the four and six, the younger buyers who are the coupe’s key audience will see good fuel economy: 23/32 miles per gallon city/highway for the four-banger, or 19/27 mpg with the V-6.

As the day wound down, talk turned to the class-shaking arrival later this year of the new Accord, that perennial benchmark. And the eye-catching (if derivative-looking) Accord Coupe will take the same tack as the Altima, with styling that moves it decisively out of the sedan’s long shadow.

But until that Accord arrives for some one-on-one with the Nissan, this Altima pretty much trashes its front-drive competition. And the reasons for that are something the Nissan coupe and sedan have in common: both pack performance, economy, and value into an uncommonly pretty package.

Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 23