Rental car trip to Asheville, NC
The Altima is an extremely competent car. So competent, in fact, that I’m not really inclined to write a proper review of it. It simply does almost everything just well enough so that there’s nothing to say about it, good or bad. It just works.
However, it does have a few areas I’d like to note where it particularly shines or stumbles.
The Good:
Fuel economy! Wow. In 1200 miles of driving, the car never failed to deliver stunning fuel economy as indicated by the display (and a cursory check on fill-up roughly confirms those results). At legal highway speeds, it will deliver about 42 mpg. Even at 80+ mph with the A/C on it does about 38 (which is the highway label). And in mixed urban and rural roads around Asheville, NC, it did about 36 mpg. The highway range with the 18 gallon tank is well over 600 miles, so you drive all day without ever needing fuel.
It seems like low roads loads are a key enabler here. It’s actually apparent from the driver’s seat that the car is extremely slippery, and it often becomes moderately annoying, even. There is virtually no noticeable lift-pedal decel at any speed. If you’re cruising at 75 and come up behind a slower car, even if you lift your foot well in advance, you’ll have to tap the brakes to slow down. If you have the cruise set at 75 and encounter a long downhill grade, you’ll find yourself doing nearly 90 at the bottom unless you ride the brakes (and then you have to manually resume cruise control).
The rental of the car cost me $200 for the week. The car used $100 less fuel than either of my BMWs would have. Then I figure I saved $50 in oil, tires, and other wear parts by not driving my own. So that leaves $50 that I have to chalk up to the convenience of not having to think about if the car was going to make it. I think that’s fair for a trip like this.
Space! This car is huge. It doesn’t seem to be constrained by the world-car need for tidy proportions. So Nissan just made it enormous. I can sit behind myself in the back seat… and cross my legs. My three kids rode back there for a short while and immediately proclaimed it more spacious than our long-wheelbase BMW 7-series. It’s big on the outside, too, and has the turning radius of a cruise ship, but this is the Good section so I’ll gloss over that part.
The Bad:
Transmission. I realize that the CVT contributes a lot to the incredible fuel economy, but its driveability is pretty bad. For starters, it’s a CVT. It pushes around the engine in a lumpy porridge of motion, and it has a large tachometer to rub your nose in the mess. But it gets even worse- sometimes the transmission tries to not act like a CVT. It seems like this pseudo-automatic mode is triggered at deep pedal positions, and it is truly dreadful. It chooses from among some set of fixed ratios, and won’t let you have anything in between. So if you mat the accelerator at highway speeds, you don’t get 6500 rpm, you get 5500. You have to be going slower or faster if you want the full 6500. And in a large car with something like 170 hp, it’s sort of important to be able to wring every last drop out of the engine. At first I thought it was no problem, I’ll drop the shifter into “Ds” and that will give me all the power, all the time. But no, there didn’t seem to be a way to disable the simulated shifting.
And it doesn’t even drive like an automatic. The relationship of vehicle speed, pedal position, and wheel torque is just completely crazy, with large holes in which the driver’s desired acceleration rate is simply not available. This kept happening on our way home from North Carolina, when we took the scenic route through the mountains of NC, TN, VA, and WV. The roads would typically be 4-lanes with 60 mph speed limits, but occasional traffic lights. When the light would turn green, I’d give a healthy boot to the pedal in an effort to get back to 60+ mph, often when pointed uphill. After some transients off the line, I’d get maybe 5000 rpm and a reasonable acceleration rate. But the engine speed would climb with vehicle speed toward a raucous 6000 rpm, which was too much for the situation. So I’d back off a touch and the trans would “upshift” to 4000 rpm, which gave too little acceleration. So I’d tip in just a hair and now get 6000+. The first time it happened, Raina asked me if the car was going to make it up the hill. I said that it would but once we got to the top I was going to set it on fire and roll it back down.
Part of the problem with the transmission is that the engine never sounds like it wants to even exist, much less propel the car. I don’t understand all of the technical details about what makes an engine sound willing or not, but I do know that a BMW I-6, for example, sounds like it wants to move the car. The Nissan I-4 sounds like it’s trapped in an exploitative indentured servitude agreement.
Idle. The car shakes at idle. You feel it through the seat, the steering, wheel, the floor under the brake pedal. Nissan- please just shut the thing off at idle. It’s awful.
Satellite radio reception. There is none if you are anywhere near a tree. Like when on the interstate and there are trees 50 feet off the shoulder. On the Blue Ridge Parkway there was more silence than sound. It’s the worst reception of any car I’ve ever driven. Something had to be broken, there is no way it should be like that.
Climate control. In mixed sun and clouds, like most of our trip, when the sun comes out from behind a cloud the system quadruples the fan speed, just in case the passengers wanted to freeze. I ended up just punching the A/C button to disable the compressor when this would happen, then turning it back on once the system had calmed down again a few minutes later.
Road noise. The car is generally quiet, but on certain road surfaces the tires and chassis would interact like I’ve never heard before. I have cars with noisy tires, and the sound always seems to come from the tires themselves. But on certain surfaces, the Altima would radiate tire noise as if from the structure of the car itself, in all directions around me. It was rare- there was just a low moaning on the Blue Ridge Parkway (which is impeccably paved because trucks are forbidden), and a really bizarre hum on I-77 north of Parkersburg that sounded like a high-powered amplifier like a rock band would use, with the input unplugged so you just hear a 60Hz hum. That was an annoying 15 minutes or so.