Today on the way back from school I had my maxima break down for the first time! I was driving down there he road when I felt the engine quit for a second, regain power for another second, then die completely. I was able to pull over and grabbed my scanner and look for codes. Nothing came up, there were no fluids leaking or obvious signs of anything wrong with the engine. I resorted to just trying to restart the engine. What happen for about 5 tries was the engine would start, but only run at about 500 rpm before dying again. What I eventually did was have my foot on the gas and it did finally fire up and return to a consistent idle. Drove home completely normally. My original thoughts were possibly water in the gas, but I am down to a 1/4 tank and you’d thing that any water would have found it’s way through the fuel system by now. My next thought was something with the fuel system and it might be that possible, but have not seen anything so far that would suggest so. You guys have any thoughts? Thanks!

 

Have you worked on the engine lately?
If yes, what did you do.

Does the exhaust smell like unburned gasoline.

 

Yeah I did work on the engine, put one of those “performance” cone filters in. I’m pretty sure I found the problem though lol. Because the filter wouldn’t fit onto the stock intake I had to make an adapter. Well I found that the secondary part of the MAF sensor had actually fallen out of the adapter I made and was just hanging in the engine bay. I just decided to throw the stock air box back on, and it was running fine this morning.

 

I installed a K&N panel filter which replaced the paper filter. I feel that performance and mileage improved.
I have used that filter for 110,000 miles.
I cleaned mine twice.

Good tgat your car runs normally again