It's time for another terrible rental review.
This time it's actually a Nissan.
This time is no better than any of the others.
This time, it has a CVT.
OH GOD THE CVT.
WHY? What synaptically-deficient mutant reject spawn of a mouse turd decided this was ACTUALLY A GOOD IDEA?
I know, I know: making fun of CVTs is so 2007.
Except it's 2015 and they're still absolutely abhorrent and terrible.
So, here's the deal. The real review. The whole car, including and aside from the worst transmission I've ever experienced in my life.
Oh, it looked like this:
I'm sorry.
EXTERIOR: 3/10
Basically, Nissan has distilled their melted-triangles styling to its most boring here. The Maxima is offensively overdetailed. The Sentra is goofy and way too tall. But the Altima? Simultaneously "meh" and "Oh, good Lord!" in a way that only Camrys have managed before.
It could certainly be uglier. I am not 100% confident that it is scientifically possible to fit more creases on the bodywork. Hyundai might pull it off. It'd take some serious effort, though.
The hood is so ridiculously overdone it's like it fell out of a six-parter Dragonball Z episode (those are a thing, right?).
Despite its plainly obvious efforts, it does not look remotely "upscale".
The grille is way too big and doesn't line up with any other lines or details of the nose. It just sort of floats there, a gigantic blob of chrome begging you to believe it's fancy. It's not. It's terrible.
The door handles are not body color. They are chrome. So you'll think it's a luxury car. It's not.
It has fog lights. Some of them have fender repeaters. This one didn't have a sunroof because rental.
It's pretty bad.
INTERIOR: 2/10
It's still pretty bad. It WANTS to try SO DAMN HARD but it just can't muster the effort. It might want to think of itself as an upscale midsizer if it had the energy but it just doesn't (being sapped by that abominable not-gearbox, perhaps???).
It has a screen in the center. It is not a touch screen. There are no dedicated media control buttons. There is no touch screen. My brain hurts now.
It also has a display between the gauges. It shows stuff, like actual live tire pressure readouts (awesome!) and a goofy isometric view of the car that does...as far as I noticed...absolutely smegging nothing. When I first saw that "mode" I thought "oh, neat, it probably shows when a door is opened." I opened my door, expecting an animation. Nope. Instead, the view of the car was replaced by a big square stating DRIVER DOOR AJAR or something to that effect. Halfway. Everything on this car is halfway. It's like someone had a good idea and then had a stroke and forgot it but it was already partly done so they just made up the rest and called it done.
The cabin is ROOMY. I actually slid the seat all the way back and decided that was too far, and my legs are longer than an unedited Peter Jackson movie.
The steering wheel tilts AND telescopes. In the base rental trim! BONUS POINTS TO NISSAN. Of course, it still blocks everything on the speedo between 40 and 140. What kind of people was this car made for? 60 inch inseam and 10 inch torso? Then again, it has plenty of headroom. You just can't see any instrumentation on the dash from way up there.
The seats adjust very poorly. On real cars, the seat rasises and lowers. And on proper rear cars, the front and rear do so separately (so you can keep your thighs from going numb without floating your knees off into space). On the Altima, it does both, sort of. As the seat raises, the rear raises faster. It sort of rotates up under you like some kind of slow-motion see-saw. It's weird, and prevented me from finding anything resembling a comfortable seating position.
The driver seat is power-adjustable. The passenger seat is manual. You decide what to make of that.
The center non-touchscreen shows no more information than the 16-segment display in my Lincoln. It just shows it in low-DPI color LCD fidelity instead. You can't do anything with it because it's not a touchscreen.
The shifter is not gated, because there are no gears. There are no paddle shifters. There's a "Ds" position below "D" to make the CVT behave stupidly in steps instead of all at once.
The rearview mirror is exactly opposite the shape of the backlight, because that makes perfect sense. The actual reflective parts of the side mirrors are deliberately smaller than their housings, because that also makes sense.
Oh, and the shoulder belt cut into my neck in a bad way. No height adjust position corrected it, because it was a seat issue. The b-pillar is so far behind the driver seat that the belt might as well belong to the rear seats.
POWERTRAIN: Just go away and never come back out of 10.
It's so much worse than I ever imagined from the most unkind reviews.
It's a QR25 and a CVT together. That's like eating a pizza made of elephant s*** with a glass of moose piss to rinse it all down.
The QR25 is so unrefined it's hilarious. It shudders and vibrates and rasps and grinds and rumbles and shakes the whole effing car and the steering column along with it.
And the CVT does its best to highlight these "features" while keeping the revs at the most obnoxious point conceivable at any given time.
The CVT behaves so unintuitively and so bizarrely that it sincerely makes driving the car feel unnatural. It's not merely the absences of stepped gears. More than that, even, is the jarring effect to which the car pairs RPM and ratio-adjustments to stand in for normal throttle changes. This car couldn't exist without electronic throttle, because the throttle is only a small part of the whole vile equation.
Here's what happens:
You press down on the long, skinny pedal. The revs shoot up to 3000 and stay there, QR25 droning on its Axel Rose operetta all the while. And that's it. Until you let off the pedal and they fall back down below 2000. If you try to ease into anything, rather than actually using the throttle to vary RPM, the car uses the CVT to match your request with more revs. You can't keep the revs low (where you can't hear or feel as much of the engine's horridness) and you can't control how the transmission responds to your inputs.
In a traditional Automatic, I can use informed throttle inputs to scale between "let's just calmly head off this way" to "I need two more gears and all the revs right now!"
In the CVT, the car always always always responds with revs. Always. Regardless of whether you need or want them.
It's no wonder CVT owners got poorer fuel economy than manual owners back when Nissan actually offered transmission options in their cars. The trans does everything in its power to keep you at 3000rpm unless you're just cruising.
Oh, is that a hill off in the distance? CVTman knows what to do! MORE REVS STAT! With a side of invasive droning!
Wait, are you speeding back up now? Better jump to 3k RPM, immediately if not sooner!
It's so bad. It sounds horrible. It feels wrong in more ways than I can express. It doesn't WORK very well. Nissan's so confident in it that they gave you another gearshift position to disguise it all as a normal automatic (because that's the benchmark for a good trans, right: Nissan Automatics????
).I can see offering it as an option.
I can even sort of fathom the idea that the investment in that tech cost money and needs to be recouped, good or bad.
I can not imagine actually building cars with it. I can't. The concept is as foreign to me as speaking Russian.
It's not right.
It doesn't actually deliver on any claimed benefits.
It ruins the driving experience in a way I never imagined possible.
It makes me YEARN for my Ford-built automatic.
It is The Worst Thing Ever.
HANDLING: Slightly existent out of 10
It's a Nissan. The ride is harsh but the feedback is numb. It's not smooth, and you feel everything, but not in a constructive way. Someone in Japan seems to have confused "stiff" with "sporty" and everyone but Mazda went along with it. It's exactly backward of how a car should ride.
The steering is just as bad. Hilariously overweighted on-center, as though trying to convince you it's engaging, it's numb but harsh. I felt everything EXCEPT where my wheels were pointed. Every rock, every road joint.
The brakes bit too hard, too fast also.
This was most certainly NOT the car I would request if someone promised me a day with the roads to myself in the alps. It's not even the car I'd request if I had to go pick up more potatoes at walmart. Other cars ride nicer and handle better at the same time. How do you miss BOTH targets? The only thing I've driven that got it more wrong was a 2000s C-class.
FEATURES AND EXTRAS: 1-10
It had a non-touchscreen, bluetooth, satellite radio, and a mostly-useless driver info center that shows a picture of the car from above.
The 1 point comes from the keyless entry system, which includes a trunk release on the trunk itself.
Not earning points either way but worthy of note: the start/stop button was so slow to respond (actually, ALL buttons suffered from this localized spacetime distortion) that I accidentally re-started the car not once, but twice, because I pressed the button again after the first press failed to work. Only it didn't fail, it just took seconds to register. And then the car turned back on again.
The car beeps obnoxiously like a 1980s Tiger Electronics handheld when locked or unlocked. It's stupid and I hate it.
It had automatic headlights.
It did not have a sunroof, and I was surprised at how distracting NOT seeing the sky out of my peripheral vision was after years and years of driving hole-in-the-top cars.
Oh, and the sunglass holder in the headliner is so wrongly shaped that no sunglasses will ever NOT fall out when it is opened.
The map lights are single, un-lensed LEDS that provide about as much useful illumination as an Al Gore speech.
OVERALL: Give me back that Chrysler 200 out of 10.
No wonder everyone buys Chryslers. This is the alternative!
^
