acmack84

So I have a 1997 Nissan Maxima that my brother gave to me. It is an automatic transmission. It has a miss (which I STILL don't completely understand what that is), and it dies at random times. The basic rundown of what happens is that after starting up the car, which incidentally goes fine most of the time, the engine occasionally drops below 500 rpm, and sputters. Sometimes pressing on the accelerator during idle/warm-up will cause the RPM to drop as well, and that usually is what makes it die. I've also observed that during warm-up, when it starts the sputtering, the tail pipe puts out worse fumes and exhaust. There are also times when I'm trying to rev it to keep it alive, that if I try to rev it anywhere near 3500-4500 rpm, it struggles to go past that point. That seems like a throttle issue but I don't know. Additionally, there are times during actual driving that the car will either start a rocking type of motion and won't change gears, or doesn't respond when I press the gas, causing it to "catch up" and then rev too much. Also, when I have to stop for an extended period, I end up switching to neutral and revving because otherwise it will die and then it becomes difficult to re-start it because of the same accelerator issue. The other thing it does is when I'm decelerating, it sounds like stuff is literally knocking together, and the same knocking sound happens when it's changing gears. At optimal operation, the engine stutters badly, and does the knocking/clanking sound, but that's all. The fuel economy is dreadful as well and I probably spend 60 or more for gas in the course of less than a week. The car has over 260k miles on it, and when my brother last took it to a mechanic, all the mechanic said was that it would be cheaper to get an entirely different car than to fix it but he didn't give a rundown of the problems. I plan on going to an auto parts store to get the check engine light diagnosed, but I still just want to know what I'm up against. It's a clunker car, so I never had high expectations to begin with, but I'm just really curious to know how the car has gotten to this point.

JvG

Regarding economy......

We don't know how many miles you drive in a week.
So we can't deduce the mpg.

The car got to this point from basic neglect.
There are probably several things wrong with it.
You should buy a cheap scanner such as the BAFX available on Amazon or ebay. About 25 dollars. It works with a smart phone. You will need that to work through the issues.

Next we need to know how much experience you have with working on cars. None of these issues seem all that expensive if you can do your own work. Yethe paying someone could get expensive quickly.
Which is why the mechanic said what he did.

In general, as long as the car can drive and shift, it's repairable. 260k is a lot of miles, but many of us have cars which run just fine with that many miles or more.

acmack84

I'd say I drive no more than 120 miles per week, mostly just getting my girlfriend and myself to work, and the occasional Walmart trip. Unfortunately, the extent of my knowledge of working on cars is replacing fuses and changing a tire. But I am someone who likes to learn as much as I can because it would be nice to have enough knowledge to where I could do my own minor work on the car. I feel like there could potentially be a couple of cheap fixes that will at least help the car not be so unpredictable ALL the time. I'm going to post again once I get diagnostics

PH98I30

You can buy a cheap code reader at Walmart to start with. They cost $10-15. Then you can scan your own codes. Then go from there.