I have to myself say that if a trans failed in 79K miles I'm done with that brand. That has never happened in all of my 40+ car owning years. No motor fail as well. You expect one or two minor things to break by that mileage but my Focus cars had easily broken between 5-10 each by that mileage. While one should expect some cheap small breakage, getting that much tells you you are driving crap. A major trans fail at that mileage is NOT an expected issue unless one is used to breakage all about him.

I have no formally trained skills in ATX repair, only self taught yet I have no trouble getting 15-20 more years out of every one I've been into. And from units I had never been into at all before doing them. So, it's not rocket science, and CVT is much easier to build than normal ATX.

I'm looking at 76K miles on both CV driveshafts on my Versa and not driven hard at all. Both are clunking and jerking the wheels and I never saw any of that from Fords until 200K+ miles, quite frankly I changed at that mileage just to change them, they were nowhere near as bad as this Nissan. That issue goes back to what I said about Japanese steel quality like with the CVT, the steels are not hard enough to do the job.

THROWAWAYCAR wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 01, 2018 4:40 pm

Are you serious? You call 79K high mileage?

Yes, I'm serious, and yes 79K on a two year old car is high mileage by industry standards. Look, I get that you're upset that the CVT failed far sooner than you expected, but it did go well past what Nissan suggested would be it's lifespan. In the end I'd chalk this up to a learning experience.

Rogue One wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 01, 2018 9:06 pm

THROWAWAYCAR wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 01, 2018 4:40 pm

Are you serious? You call 79K high mileage?

Yes, I'm serious, and yes 79K on a two year old car is high mileage by industry standards. Look, I get that you're upset that the CVT failed far sooner than you expected, but it did go well past what Nissan suggested would be it's lifespan. In the end I'd chalk this up to a learning experience.

Learning experience my a**. Do you work for Nissan? If they can only guarantee 60K miles on a transmission, then they should lower the price of the damn things to 10K total. These cars are too expensive for such a huge expense to have to contend with with very little miles. You must be really young because you do not know what quality is for sure. Nissan does not know quality. Since they have such a cheap crap design, they should at least have 100k warranty on the tranny. But, they know that this is the way that they can keep on draining our wallets. I most definitely will never own another Nissan. I will never own another foreign car period. It would be a learning experience if I could get out of the loan easily and be able to get a fair trade. Like I said, I owe 10k. The trade is only worth 9k on a 22k car 2 years ago.
If that was all then it would not be so bad but, since i just put another 3k and have to spend another 1200 to 1500 to sell it, it is shame. Nissan SUCKS it is that simple.

amc49 wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 01, 2018 6:33 pm

I have to myself say that if a trans failed in 79K miles I'm done with that brand. That has never happened in all of my 40+ car owning years. No motor fail as well. You expect one or two minor things to break by that mileage but my Focus cars had easily broken between 5-10 each by that mileage. While one should expect some cheap small breakage, getting that much tells you you are driving crap. A major trans fail at that mileage is NOT an expected issue unless one is used to breakage all about him.

I have no formally trained skills in ATX repair, only self taught yet I have no trouble getting 15-20 more years out of every one I've been into. And from units I had never been into at all before doing them. So, it's not rocket science, and CVT is much easier to build than normal ATX.

I'm looking at 76K miles on both CV driveshafts on my Versa and not driven hard at all. Both are clunking and jerking the wheels and I never saw any of that from Fords until 200K+ miles, quite frankly I changed at that mileage just to change them, they were nowhere near as bad as this Nissan. That issue goes back to what I said about Japanese steel quality like with the CVT, the steels are not hard enough to do the job.

Amen to everything you have just said......

Anybody that thinks the end of the warranty should be considered as the expected end of a product life.............best have pockets full of money, I for one expect at LEAST 2-3 times the end of warranty in life or that brand is forever crossed off my list as one to do business with. There are simply too many other vendors that will go WAAAAAYYY beyond that.

THROWAWAYCAR wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 01, 2018 10:13 pm

Learning experience my a**.

Nissan SUCKS it is that simple.

See, you did learn something!

I've successfully avoided all of this by:

1) Doing my research before I buy
2) Not buying a car with a CVT
3) Taking the expert advice of people who have worked for the manufacturer (many of whom are here), folks that build CVTs, and professional mechanics who aren't beholden to the OEM and can speak openly and honestly.

40k miles a year is ABSOLUTELY considered high mileage by industry standards. That is an indisputable fact, whether you like it or not.

No one has disputed that a transmission should last far longer than that. A CVT is, by design, inferior (and in my opinion, inappropriate for the function that is asked of it).

You've been provided with plenty of ammunition to pick a fight with NNA.

Lipping off at my staff (who I guarantee is older than you and more mechanically experienced) is not the way to go about it.

Feel free to continue to rant, but no one here is to blame for your situation. In fact, I think we've agreed with you for the most part.

Just for some numbers. I have a 15 2.5 & I drive ALOT in Texas. Fortunately, I have not had any issues with mine. However, I have seen on several occasions the Trans temp hit 285*-300* after an hour or so driving @ 80-90mph in 100*+ Temps. The trans is remarkably bad! Kudos to the team @ Nissan!

Ever driven hwy. 77 to the east of Waco and Austin before? 4 lanes of the smoothest most beautiful highway through the lonely quiet Texas woods you ever saw and virtually no cars on it at all. A place to let her rip wide open for a while, but occasionally you will come over a slight rise to find a black-and-white sitting there all alone just waiting for people like that. I loved that section of highway..........

amc49 wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 22, 2018 7:31 am

Ever driven hwy. 77 to the east of Waco and Austin before? 4 lanes of the smoothest most beautiful highway through the lonely quiet Texas woods you ever saw and virtually no cars on it at all. A place to let her rip wide open for a while, but occasionally you will come over a slight rise to find a black-and-white sitting there all alone just waiting for people like that. I loved that section of highway..........

Oh yeah, I love it out there. Its much better suited for a weekend toy than an Altima, but its a nice stretch of pavement. East Texas is blast in the Altima with alot of elevation changes and twisties. Car is quite impressive with the right setup under it. Just crossing my fingers the trans doesn't let go out there sometime.

I understand in a recent model year the CVT bands were exchanged for steel belts for the V6 models.
Anyone know anything more?

Is there a know model year where the CVT has seen enough product improvement to be stronger?

I owned a 2014 Altima with CVT for approx 16,000 miles (from 19,000) loved the mpg... Also owned a 2009 Maxima w/ CVT also from 19k on the odo for about 20000 miles.
.... I was considering an 2017 ish 2.5 SL Altima..

The belts have always been steel, the normal rubber type used in industrial CVT transmissions will not hold up in the normal oil temperatures found in a hydraulic transmission. Although the belts appear to tear up quickly, it is the rest of the unit tearing up that spits the belt into 10,000 pieces as they are simply put together by trapping pieces all together in a couple of steel bands like the most intricate puzzle made on earth. The trans pulleys have to remain dead steady to keep the belt together and not doing that is what lets the belt come apart. Most commonly one set of pulleys fails a support bearing to let the pulley set flop around, the belt is doomed once that happens. Or the belt loses the tooth grab to the pulleys, then the constant ratio ramping up and down begins when the ECM/TCM cannot decide what 'gear' the trans is truly in due to slipping. Then the sudden impact hits when the belt does try to grab erratically tend to break the belt as well.

They get better but only by small amounts, no one thing has changed the life drastically. Part of the issue is technology related, CVTs require around 800 psi of pressure to hold the pulleys together reliably, before that most ATX used up to maybe 250 psi max and that was only in reverse. The pressure increase is really hard on the bearings that hold the pulleys in place and it shows, they shell out quick.

Nissan's place in that issue is that now they are the poor stepchild of Japanese cars, they do not want to spend money hardening parts any more than needed to just get by whereas others (Honda, Toyota) that do CVT have gone further than that to make things better. The Nissan viewpoint as to car lifetimes and longterm durability has changed since the company went to Renault, and what Renault does to any company they take over. They tend to cheapen the company vastly as compared to what they were before, and don't really worry about how well the product is doing say 5 years later.

^ Well stated.

I wish it were not so, I came here looking for some relief from Ford and where they are going, it seems to be more of the same but in a different way, the results are the same however.

Car makers have been pressed so hard by regulations that they are now going to darker places to get the profits they feel they need, my view is that having included plenty of banks (by force in many cases) on the boards of directors now is what is pushing that like with plenty of other well known corporations that have gotten much more cynical in how they approach business now. I printed financial for 35 years and had inside info on many of them, you get to where you can follow where they are going and it is NOT good in many cases. The problem being that as the businesses mature to max out profits as all eventually do the bankers refuse to accept that at all. Why US corporations focus way too much on the next quarter and the short term rather than where they will be in 5 or 10 years. They then are forced to run much higher risk and then any mistakes make the company suffer much more.

Take the Nissan CVT issue or Fords' DCT trans issue, pretty much the same. Rushed design not perfected and put out to market with incomplete testing in the real world, they rely solely on the computer design now and wait to fix any errors later (part of the problem is the new thinking that software changes fix everything), but some of them are too big to fix and need to be dumped instead. Hard to do when you have already banked the entire company on it. I'm waiting for the new Nissan VC engine to begin to show those issues, it is so whoppingly complicated there will likely be a lot of things going wrong to bring them down way ahead of time and just try fixing them, it will cost so much the cars will be going straight to resale or the scrapyards. That one is flawed from the start, a variable compression engine that doubles the part count to do it when it was turbocharged to begin with and why didn't they simply ramp up the boost instead? Somebody checked his brain in at the door on that design team day.

The American public with its' shortsighted desire to never be 'bored' and always wanting something 'new' has pretty much had a healthy hand in all that too. Sheep going to the slaughter.

^ This...

Throw in easy financing, and Americans' belief that they 'deserve' a new car, and the automakers are doing a Mr. Burns impression all the way to the bank.

My son and I joke (not fair really) about a woman at his job who just HAD to have a new car and she bought a used low end '13 Versa but her husband is an ex-con flipping burgers and they still think the same and with wrecked credit she is happy now with the 'new' car and $570/month payments on it!!! She has to work 80 hours a week just to stay barely above water. She just got $2000 from her bank in returned funds when someone was skimming her account at $50/month and she never caught it for years (!!!, you can't make this crap up!) and instead of paying off bills to make life easier when they routinely cut all overtime from time to time as the company edict changes, what does she do? Spend it in a down payment for ANOTHER car, a Cube this time at another $500+ a month!

There is often a reason why people stay poor and it is tied to brain management. The catering to self that all business does now has ruined millions of lives yet the people still do not get it at all.

...and yet, we're apparently supposed to blame "greedy" business owners, "greedy" banks, and "the "greedy" wealthy.

WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK IS MAKING THEM RICH???

Also, yay capitalism. Being stupid is supposed to hurt.

Oh, there is way more than enough blame to go around............on both sides of that mountain. The only difference there is not one of intelligence level, rather one of daring more rather than being satisfied to simply not lift a finger to do anything to make things different. I've met plenty of rich people that are so stupid you wonder how on earth they got that way, meaning both. And the 800 pound gorilla in the room doesn't inspire people to get any smarter either.

Still hoping that there will be come reliability improvements on the CVT..
Or maybe just get a overly long aftermarket warranty... (shrug)

I am still lusting for the unrefueled range my 2014 Alti gave me.. a real 40 mpg on the hiway combined with an 18 gallon tank..
Drove from Alexandria, VA to Columbus, Ohio and had almost half a tank left!

On the other hand maybe there is a luck of the draw thing involved with these too...
Last fall I rode in a Versa taxi (CVT) in DC to the airport.. ... and the guy told me he had 600,000 miles on the car.
..original engine and tranny and only regular maintenance and things like brake pads.... . he mentioned one or two accessories that needed replacement in that time.. i want to say maybe powersteering pump and AC compressor but I am not 100% on my memory on that.