If your garage is that narrow, how do you open the doors and get out of the car? I have a one-car garage and never fold my mirrors and i'm just fine getting into my garage and have room to get out of my car without contortion.

 

its a really nicely integrated system that has lines that guide you back where the car is going with the current steering position and as you get closer, the green guide lines change from yellow to red.

I do agree that looking backwards is still important and the camera kind of takes away from that but overall the system is great in the maxima (yes I tried the '09 as well)

 

The passenger door can not be opened. The driver is fine. The issue is that there has to be room to walk down the left side of the car with a garbage can, recycling container, etc there. Or if I park in the middle I would have to back the car out to get to the garbage....

 

Gotcha. I keep forgetting that other people occasionally carry passengers!!!

 

Everyone is talking about the mirrors and back up sonar, if you live in the country you miss the bi-xeon head lights, the 09's only have xeon head lights.

 

johnsd2 - That may be partly my fault. After having my headlight beams lowered several times (WELL below specs) so that the xenon low beams did not blind drivers when hills and curves threw the geometry askew, a Nissan tech told me it had probably been a mistake to have the low beams xenon. But that was almost four years ago, so there may be no connection.

 

Have to disagree there... the 6G HID projector low beams are fine (maybe the best I've used) and I have never had a driver flash their lights back at me. What really sucks in the 6G is the high beams. They are one of the worst I've ever used. There is no way that one lens/reflecter combo can both be an effective flood light (low beams) and spot light (high beams). Cutting off the top of the very nice flood pattern is fine for the low beam, but removing the cutoff does not turn it into a proper high beam. All it does is light up the trees and overhead signs, but nothing is refocusing the pattern to light up the path further down the road.

The conventional halogen high beams in my '03 (which had decent non-projector HID lows) were vastly superior in projecting their beam further down the road. I expect that the 7G HID projector low beam with seperate high beam element will the best of both worlds. (Actually, the BEST would be seperate lens/reflector with two seperate pairs of HID bulbs... but cost would be prohibitive to a penny pinching car manufacturer).

 

My 04 and 06 high beams worked perfect. they had a nice cut off patter, not to high up in the trees and far down the road. There is plate in bi-xeon lights that moves to let more light out. There is 2 bulbs in the light. Google bi-xeon and there are links that explain how they work. When the lights are on bright there should be a 3 sided pattern ( /-\), (the middle dash lines up with the slashes) that you see with sharp cut offs, the cut offs should be no more than about 20 feet above the ground, at 100 feet. headlight aiming is very critical with xeons. On my 04 the left one was aimed to high from the factory, you could tell because the cut offs on high didn't line up, when fixed there was more light on the road.

 

From WikiCars:The Nissan version uses the "moving shield" method - the cheap way out, BTW, as it requires less precision - rather than physically refocusing the beam (i.e., moving the bulb) to a proper pattern (a wide pattern for low beams, a narrow pattern for high beams).

Merely removing the physical cut-off shade to create a "high beam" does nothing to concentrate the available lumens in a tighter pattern that would project further down the road. A good example of refocusing a light pattern can be found in any MAG flashlight... by moving the reflector relative to the bulb (which is what happens when you rotate the lens housing), you can either create a wide (but less bright in any given spot) pattern or concentrate the light output into a narrow bright beam that can provide useful illumination at a much greater distance. Rather than do this in their bi-xenon headlamp system, Nissan chose to keep the the same wide pattern for both high and low beams, adding a shade to keep it out of oncoming eyes when on "low beam". You merely have a choice of "low beam with shade" or "low beam without shade" - it does not have a true high beam with a narrower, concentrated pattern to illuminate further down the road.

Both the 6.0g and 6.5g headlight systems work exactly the same way. I have not experienced 6.0g headlights so I can't say if they are better or worse than the 6.5g. They may or may not have a different reflector/lens design (with a different basic pattern), but it appears that the principals of operation are the same. Your 6.0g does not have two bulbs, as you stated.

The end result - for the 6.5g at least, is terrible. I almost never use the high beams at all because there is nothing to gain from them... nothing changes whatsoever relative to what is illuminated down the road... the only help they are is for reading overhead signs.

As previously stated, my '03 with HID lows and seperate halogen highs (with a properly focused pattern) provided vastly superior high beam performance. Even better than either the '03 or the '07 HID's was my all-halogen S60T5 headlamp system, which eschewed the fashionable but miserably inadequate clear lenses for a proper multi-element glass lens along with seperate and properly matched bulbs and reflectors. The result was amazingly good performance, even with standard bulbs, and unbelievably good when fitted with SilverStar Ultra bulbs.

 

Thanks for the info, as my Max. was a 06 early manufactured, delivered sept. 05. I had no problem with my headlights. I never drove a 07 or 08 to experence the lights at night, to see if there was a difference. What bulb replacement do you suggest for the fog lights? Thanks again for your info.

 

Is it just me or are the Headrests on the new Maxima the hardest thing to rest your head on since the invention of the rock??? Please softer Headrest should be standard.

 

Getting back to the original thread...

I don't think I will be buying a 7th gen, unless they come up with a manual tranny.

THBS, what I missed with my 4th and now 5.5th gens is the cornering light that my 2nd gen had.

If you are taking a corner at night, hit the turn signal, and 'voila', there's the road!