I noticed my car was doing some rattling under the hood it sounded like something was loose. Anyway, I took it to the dealership and he told me it was a spark knock due to the type of gas I put in my car and the Injen CAI might have something do with it also. He basically reprogrammed my computer and told me to only put 93 octane in the car. I was wondering if any of you guys have ever had this problem?

 

Did the reprogramming of your computer and high octane gas permanently cure your problem? I have not been able to cure my knock / ping. The only thing the dealer has done is identified it as a knock. Told me to use high octane gas and buy a new Nissan air filter. I've always used 91 octane from various name brand stations and the air filter I replaced. This made no difference. My car is completely stock.

 

try using only chevron fuel ONLY and wait a week or so and see if anything improves

 

I've been using 93 Mobile exclusively and have never had a problem with my Max. Some of you need to stop feeding your car junk.

 

Spastic,

Its only been a few days since I got it back I'll let you know something in a few weeks. I just filled up with high octance gas so we'll see!

 

I was getting ready to post this same thing.
I have NEVER ran anything but 91 or 93 octane. Lately i've noticed a definite
light spark knock, but only noticed twice so far and it only lasted a few seconds
then seemed to go away (knock sensor kicking in and making adjustments?) . I just turned over 30K miles. Maybe I paid for premium and got regular? I bought the gas from a local Thorntons who claims to use BP gas (have bought gas here for years with no problems in the past). When it got to 1/2 tank I filled up with BP 93 and haven't noticed any what I call "light spark knock" last couple days.

 

Crazcajun,

Thanks, that would be great if you let me know. I'm past the point of being frustrated by this problem. It's more like depressing now. I hear knock / ping every time I accelerate from a stop.

And for all those that say we need to stop using bad gas. I've tried everything. I only go to the major name stations; I always put in premium (except for the time I was told to fill up with midgrade by the Nissan tech and the other times I was experimenting.) Other than that it always gets 91 octane. Adding octane booter to 91 octane gas makes no difference. The only thing that made a difference was some fuel treatment that I added. I can't find the name but it was something like BK-44 or BKG-44. After I added this to the tank I didn't have any knocks for the next three tank fulls of gas. But the stuff is too expensive to add to every tank or every 3rd fillup.

I never see a check engine light. Maybe my knock sensor is bad. Would a check light appear if this was malfunctioning?

Any help would be great.
Thanks.

 

Spastic,

Over the past two days I have really tired to listen to the knock and I think its improving some. 03Maximan brought up how many miles he has on his car and mine has about 33K on it. I'm guessing about 30K is when I started noticing the knock. I have never seen the check engine light come on I just noticed that sometimes the knock is louder than others. I also might try some of that BG 44K fuel cleaner to see if that will help but I have also tried octane booster and that didn't work. I told the Nissan tech that I was going to give it one month and if it didn't get better I was bringing it back in.

 

It's probably your ignition coils, though I don't know how often they are the source of problems on an 02. On an 00 they are almost always the cause of pinging. I invariably put in the cheapest gasoline I can find (93), and it never knocks in my 00, but for a while it was - and it was getting worse. I replaced the notoriousyl faulty ignition coils and the knock has gone away.

Other than being on good gas you could try running an injector cleaner through it, like chevron techron concentrate (buy from walmart, since most chevron stations actually don't carry it; they do have a much lower concentration of it in their gasoline you buy, however).

 

This is not an unusual phenomenon. A few of us have noticed light knocking around 2000 to 2500 RPM under no to little throttle.

It is believed that the fuel management program is either a little to ambitious or the design of the intake manifold contribute to the problem. There have been numerous threads on this in the past.

 

Add me to the frustrated. Mine has been pinging for a while now and I had the coils replaced last year under the extended warranty.
The knock sensor does not appear to help in this case as I never get power loss from the ignition being retarded. No CEL and I don't have a code scanner so I don't know if it's throwing a code.
Gas in the North East and other regions with smog problems has ethanol added to help reduce emissions. I'm tempted to blame the ethanol. Seafoam seems to help me for a couple of tanks.
Considering the trouble I have had with this car (Coils, major 5 speed trans problem, high oil consumption, etc) I'm tempted to trade it in. Unfortunately the depreciaton on the 5 gen Max is so bad I'm hopelessly upside down on the loan.

 

I'm still on the list of the frustrated!!! This has been an issue for me since I bought the car. Still no answer. The only suggestion other that the usual stuff... 93 octane, injector cleaner, clean throttle body, change coils, etc., was to get on the highway and romp on it to blow the carbon build up. Apparently the maxes are notorious for this problem. Cool dry days it's not so bad, but on the hot humid days it's terrible. I've blown it out a few times with a little improvement (or at least I think) but I'm just going to live with it until I get some type of bigger problem.

 

until Nissan puts out a TSB out for this, you might as well live with it. I've tried everything in the book from coils, plugs, induction service, different brands of gas, etc.

 

I never experienced this with my '97 maxima. This is really starting to **** me off. I don't think it's decreasing my performance but I'm concerned about the longevity of my engine due to the knock. Will this over time damage my engine?

 

Well, to update an earlier posting, i still notice some spark knock but definatly not all the time. Seems to be occuring when you've run for some miles the engine gets good and hot and you make a stop somewhere, shut off the engine for a few minutes, then startup again and go, with light to moderate acceleration thats when i seem to notice it. One thing keeps sticking in my mind that I heard or read something somewhere that said optimal fuel economy is acheived with light spark knock, i dunno but my last fillup went like this: 346 miles (mixed city/highway) on 15.7 gallons = 22 MPG. It just sucks that i hear this while using premium fuel.

 

Same symptoms for my car except I get 400 + per tank as I drive mostly highway.

While researching this I ran across a Chevy site that that had threads indicating that certain Chevy V6's have the same problem. The culprit seems to be the EGR valve getting clogged with carbon build up. I working up the energy to look into this on my Max.

 

Any updates here? Unfortunatly I have none. crazcajun... have you noticed a drastic change since you had the work done.