Cabowabo

I would do a search on this but I don't know what exactly to search for. Here's what happened...

Friday I was driving home from work, my commute consists of driving through some pretty hilly areas before reaching rt 17 in NJ. Once I hit 17 I accelerate hard to get in the flow of traffic and that's when it happened. While accelerating, it felt like I was in too high of a gear but I wasn't. The car would just not accelerate hard at all, I would floor it and it would just accelerate slowly going through waves of acceleration, so to speak, but never hitting it's full potential. I was expecting to see an engine light, nothing. It was also accompanied by a smell similar to burnt wires which lasted most of my ride home of about an hour. I get in to my town. In first gear I could not spin my tires on wet pavement so I knew something was really wrong here. Saturday morning, I decide to take it out for a test ride, it's all better, like nothing ever happened. Today I had a spirited ride to work, trying to break the max, nothing, everything was fine.

Now I know if I bring this in to the dealer they will find nothing wrong. Any clues to what may have happened?

Cabowabo....Tequila!!!

Tanman

What year car do you have?

Cabowabo

Oh, sorry, '02 Max SE 6 speed

Cabowabo

Tanman

Did you do a visual inspection under the hood? Burning wires is bad.

92 SE-R 02 SE

how many miles on the car? Any mods? Thats wierd that you had the problem, and then it went away..

2002Maxxxima

I don't know, but it sounds just like this:

http://forums.maxima.org/showthread....ghlight=reboot

MaximaMan77

Not only under the hood but under the dash. I would inspect every thing I could see using a flash light under the dash. This sounds very dangerous not only the possible complete lost of power but fire.

It is possible that the wiring harness is defective. All it takes is 1 frayed hot wire to find a ground and you have problems.

The 3 questions I would ask are.
When it happened did you have the vent open while you were driving? If not it was probably not under the hood, other than going through the fire wall, more likely under the dash.

Was it dark out, did you have your lights on? If so did you notice any dimming of the headlights or instrument panel.

Were you taking the hills hard? The movement of the car could have worn through the insulation of an unprotected wire and grounded its self. As you say this is part of your daily commute it could be a repetitive motion that caused the wear.

I would still take it to the dealer as without taking the dash apart you can not see everything and it may need to have more than that taken apart. And if it happened again that would be my next stop. This is a driver safty issue they shouldn't take it lightly, niether sould you.

This sounds like it is an isolated case. Although the possibility still exists that this a design flaw so I am very interested in your out come.

njmaxseltd

iTrader: (19)

Sounds like it went into fail safe mode. But why? No CEL if strange. Maybe the error happened so fast the ECU didn't have time to record it, but did kick the car into fail safe mode. If that could happen, that would explain what happened.

Some failures that can cause fail safe mode are:

MAS Sensor - Already a known issue
TPS Sensor - Throttle stopper TSB?

Cabowabo

I don't have mods at all, except for different windshield washer fluid but I think it's pretty safe to say that had nothing to do with it. Rainx washer fluid is awesome.

My car is completly stock 6 speed se with 10,750 miles on it. It does sound alot like what happened in the link above. No guts at all but then next time I started the car, it went like a bat out of hell!!
Weird...

Cabowabo... Tequila

Maximax2

Yeah - Maxima by Microsoft...at least the "reboot" fixed it.

Kojiro_FtT

I really don't think that could happen. It's not like forgetting a phone number before you can write it down.

serin

iTrader: (2)

had the same thing happen on my 2k. took it off the freeway and then shut it down for a bit. started the engine and same thing, couldn't even accelerate to street speeds. i decided to just go home and figure it out when about a block away she got her ***** back... like nothing ever happened. i disconnected my battery that night just to be sure. it's never happened again, and it didn't throw a code that i know of so i resigned myself to not finding out the cause. very strange.
no strange smells tho. could it have been something that somehow got into your engine and temporarily confused the maf? then it burned away maybe??? i don't know.

Cabowabo

My car has been running fine since. I called my service department and asked if they though I should bring it in and they said if it's running fine now just to keep an eye on it. I guess it would be pointless to bring it in if the problem can be reproduced. If it does happen again, a dealer will be my next stop.

Cabowabo