first off, my car is a 2002 nissan maxima 6MT, SE, pearl white, with almost all the options you could get (doesnt have heated mirrors.... or nav.)

car drove smooth, cruise worked great, i have 235/55/17 tires on it so i have alittle higher stance than most maxima's gas mileage was great, trip computer showed 30.3 MPG when i pulled back into my driveway last night, i drove from charleston WV, to parkersburg WV, bought a guitar and amp for my daughter, then drove to columbus ohio to take my wife to a maroon 5 concert, then drove back home, we did eat at thurmans cafe in columbus while we were there though.

anyway i figured id post about how pleasant my drive was, the only thing that could have gone better was on the way back my wife and i noticed that the car had a bad smell, it wasnt oil or coolant, it just had a bad smell, almost like being a mile back from a truck hauling pigs, or animals, makes me worry about my catalytic converter, but at 30 MPG i doubt it would be plugged up.

matthew

 

Maybe there's a dead animal somewhere on or in the car. Check the cabin air filter to see if anything is amiss in there.

And don't get too confident with that MPG display. I've gotten mine to read over 70mpg. If I reset it when cruising it will read around 30mpg. But once back to normal combined driving it will sit between 21-23 and even then it is known to be optimistic.

 

Replace the air cabin filter would be the best first step:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/CABIN-AIR-FI...1a0756&vxp=mtr

And this may sound stupid, but check the floormats to make sure you didn't step in dog poo before the ride home.

 

My friend did that once. He had fabric floor matts not rubber, so basically dog **** all over the floor. It was a pleasent ride home.

 

im starting to think we could have randomly passed several dead skunks, cause thats what it smelled like after i think about it, we'd go miles and not smell a thing, then we'd smell it for 2-3 miles straight and it would go away again.


the MPG was alittle off, but not horribly, after manually checking gas mileage after i filled up, i averaged 28.1 MPG the first 400 miles i drove the car i averaged 17 MPG of ONLY in town driving.

matthew

 

a lot of you seem to underestimate the kind of mileage you can get with these engines, whether the computer is optimistic or not.

 

What the hell?? Isn't the in cabin air filter supposed to prevent all of those nasty smells getting in? Like, at all?

Your experience sounds just like something I would expect in my car which has no in cabin air filtration system at all.

 

nice trip) Some people say that stock computer on 02-03 is showing about 4mpg more than actual.

When you will be replacing the cabin filter, check for all the foreign stuff in the housing for the filter - i had a lot of feathers there from the previous owner

 

did it smell like rotten eggs? If it smelled like rotten eggs (found in a separate thread) it could be pre-cats going.. I definitely remember that smell driving in my max..

 

Yeah changing the Air Cabin Filters will help, mine were Filthy, how many miles is on the car, that can kinda help to know how the Precats are....