Have had my max for almost a year, and have had this rattling in the sunroof for almost 6 months, finally i made time to get to the dealership, and sure enough they have to replace a "track" to the tune of almost a GRAND!!! have 26,000 miles still covered fortunately. Ownership of this car has been really f@#$*& up, it has only been the fact that my service mgr. has been one hell of a guy and has bent over backward to help in all the little "THINGS" that have plagued this car. I really appreciate this forum, because had i known about this and all the other things that i have endured with this car i would have not purchased it......i probably would have bought a G35 as my sister did!! NISSAN has a lot of explaining to do about why this car, and the generations before it have suffered so many of the same ailments...

 

I have had my '04 for some time now, and it is flawless.
Other than the sunroof, what else is wrong? So the sunroof
needed repair, so what? I have yet to see any dealership
that is without a service department. Mercedes, BMW, Rolls
Royce, you name it they all break. Get used to it and quit
bellyaching. Just get it fixed.

 

Yeah, I have one of those flawless Maximas, too (unless you want to crab about a little minor discoloration on the display screen, which is not a functional failure).

And you just have to go to the FA G35 forum to see what "flaws" are all about. I love the looks of that car, but after reading all the rants about brake problems, transmission problems, gas tank problems, sub-par mileage, rattles and squeaks, general poor build quality, etc., etc., I think you'd be out of the frying pan and into the fire if you had gotten one of those!

Mike

 

i am curious, when did you purchase yours??? that was just one of quite a few problems. I am a ford motor employee and my previous car was a 98 taurus, the powertrain was flawless for 5+ years the only thing that i went to the service dept. for was a bad cluster(climate cont/radio) and they were coming out of the box bad......My point is that i expected more from the competition...when i got rid of that taurus it had 126,000.

 

billdo66 - we have had threads here (recently) where dozens of consecutive posters lauded their '04 Maximas as either trouble-free, or virtually so.

Perhaps I am generalizing, but I seem to recall more problems early in the model year (March '03 to late summer '03) than since. It may be that your car was one of the ones built before Nissan had implemented some of the 'fixes' at the production line level.

Your '98 Taurus was in its third year with very few modifications (the Taurus was redesigned in '96), so Ford pretty much had the bugs out by then.

My wife drives Ford trucks (and has since 1984), so I can assure you Fords have problems also. I will say we feel Fords may be the best-built of the 'big three' automakers.

I regret your '04 Maxima problems, but I can assure you the G35 is not the answer. I won't go there, as a previous poster has already hit the lowlites of the G35.