Hey guys,

Finally took my 2k2 6 spd in yesterday to get a couple of minor issues looked at. The main was was that the heater in the steering wheel was not working. The light was coming on in the switch, and I could hear the relay clicking but no heat.

The dealer looked at this and they are stumped. Apparently, there is power going into the steering wheel for the heating elements but for some reason they are not working. The dealer has ordered a new steering wheel for me and they are just going to replace it.

The second issue I had was occasional rough idle. Intermittently, when sitting at a stop for 30 seconds or more, I feel the engine "jolt". Its strong enough that the first time this happened with passengers in the car, I thought somebody was moving around.

I thought for sure the dealer was going to feed me a line on this one but instead they've ordered 6 new coils and are going to replace them all. I was talking to the Service Manager while picking up my car and he told me he had a similar problem in his 2k2 Maxima and changing the coils fixed it.

On a side note, the dealer gave me a brand spanking new automatic Sentra GXE as a loaner. What a POS. After driving the thing for the day I realize I can never go back to econoboxes.

 

I've had that for 2 years and my dealer wont do squat. Maybe I should just drive out of state for all my warranty work.

 

They seem like a pretty good dealer, but sometimes you have to be persistent. We had a problem with our 2K Maxima which started after owning the car for 8 months that we finally had resolved before X-mas.

When going over bumps at low speeds (below 30-40 km/h), we would get a clunking sound from the back of the car. The problem was that driving on smooth surfaces would not cause the noise to surface, nor would pushing the back-end of the car up and down. It was really kinda annoying to be driving a $30K and have this clunking.

The first time we took it to the dealer, they regreased the brake pistons because apparently there was some feedback from Nissan that there was a known issue with the grease dispacing and the piston hitting the sides of the cylinder. That didn't work.

The second time they did the standard "brake-job" (for which I was due anyways) and told me this fixed the problem. It didn't. At this point, they started feeding me the "its just the way the car is" and "they're all like that". I even had the service manager tell me that they took another Maxima out and it made a similar noise.

My reply to this was that I also own a 2k2 Maxima and it certainly doesn't make this noise, so I don't buy that its just the way the car is.

I finally made a point of finding a bumpy parking lot near the dealership where I could reliably get the noise to occur. I then went to the dealer and politely asked for a service tech to come with me for 5 minutes. We went for a little ride and I took him to the parking lot and got the car to make the noise, and he could definitely hear it. I told him point blank "Please don't tell me that that's normal" and he concurred.

Long story short,they called Nissan Tech support and they recommended replacing the gas struts in the rear. They did, and the noise went away.

So, the ended up fixing it but I feel I had to push them a little more that I should of needed to to get this resolved.

 

You know in the day and age of computer diagnostics, its amazing how little troubleshooting occurs anymore. People just don't "think" about how to reproduce/solve problems. I have had to do the "thinking" for my dealer too. Solved great once I show them how to reproduce the problem.

Glad you got some good resolution.

 

mine doesnt throw any codes I even bought my own reader and still no codes. I guess I will just live with the loaping..

 

That is what I got as a loaner while the dealer is installing my new trans, and I feel the same way about it.