Nissan’s first-quarter operating profit fell 98.5%!
Carlos Goshn kept the cats at Nissan, Renault and Mitsu corraled and making money. It has been suggested that internal forces at both companies conspired to not only kick him out but get him arrested. It didn’t take long for this to show.
It might get even worse. DK and UK tests has revealed that the Nissan Qashqai diesel expels more than 17 times the legal limit of NOx and Nissan refuse to do anything about it. Other marques also failed, but not even close to that extent. Renault, as the “owner” of Nissan has a “Qashqai” model also - the Kadjar, but those will be recalled for an upgrade to comply with the EU regulations.
Yes, and now Fiat is trying to join the evil-axis. 
Why would a company with a bad record on under-hood repairs want to join one who has bad trannies? They could bring Fisher body in and complete the set, I guess.
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They need a complete makeover and to get rid of the garbage CVT’s they use .
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One thing that surprises me about Nissan on a local level is just how wildly popular they are around here. The small city (50k people) near where I live has a now Nissan only dealership downtown in a 1930s building. They used to also carry Pontiac and Cadillac, Cadillac wanted a new building on the west side of town where it is booming a bit. Other downtown dealers long ago moved out west. Cadillac went away and now they’re a stand alone Nissan dealer still downtown.
They bought adjoining lot after adjoining lot and have probably close to 1500 Nissans on the lot if not more. They’re all over the roads here and as thick as roaches in a ghetto slum. I heard they are considering moving too but with things the way they are up top they may be holding off.
I feel sorry for the techs in the service dept as that building size-wise is suitable for Smart cars. It’s unbelievably cramped and I have no idea how they manage to wrestle a car in and out of there much less a full sized truck.
The local news reports that the Nissan plant in central Mississippi has indicated there will be no reduction in production or layoffs due to corporate wide cut backs. It’s a big plant producing SUVs and pickups.
But I’ll mention that the local news hates bad news and the editors has the three monkeys on his desk as his guiding stars.
I find the Nissan dealership parts dept in my area more helpful than most of the others. That’s about my only Nissan related experience. Oh, a friend of mine had an older (1980’s) Nissan and liked it, although it had some paint appearance problems. Besides the current CVT issues do Nissans have seemingly systematic reliability problems? I think the comparable Nissan sedan is a little less expensive than say a Toyota or Honda, is that b/c of design compromises to reduce cost? Or is it just that the Nissan brand doesn’t have quite the same re-sale value? Were I looking to purchase a new truck I’d definitely consider a Nissan Frontier in the manual transmission configuration, if they still make that model.
You can get a new Nissan Frontier with a stick shift for under $20,000. $16,500-$17,000 possible at some dealers according to Cargurus.
I was looking into a Frontier, sure it is not the best truck, ride power finish, but a manual trans at that price I will survive.
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Several car manufacturers are having problems with automatic transmissions these days, and not only with CVTs. I bought a new Versa last year but did my homework and went with a manual transmission. Its the cheapest model of the cheapest car in the US but I believe it will be reliable. I’m skeptical of CVTs in general but have heard that some of them do hold up. Nissan evidently went the cheap route and sourced the transmissions from the lowest bidder, and it will cost them monetarily and in reputation.
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To the best of my knowledge, Nissan’s CVTs are built by the same company–JATCO–that makes transmissions for all of the other Japanese companies.
It seems that the other Japanese car companies’ transmission designs hold-up much better than Nissan’s, despite coming out of the same JATCO factories. The difference in this case is that JATCO is building transmissions that Nissan designed, rather than designs from Toyota, or Honda, or Mazda, or Subaru.
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Over at CarComplaints.Com the manual transmission Frontier looks to get pretty good marks. The automatic equipped Frontier, not so much. There appears to be a clear problem with the automatic transmission configuration. The main problem – this is sort of hard to believe in these days – but it appears to be caused by coolant getting into the a automatic transmission due to a problem in the radiator. Not sure if it is CVT transmission or not. I’m guessing they don’t put a CVT in the Frontier, due to the truck’s heavy load requirement. So the Frontier in manual transmission seems a pretty good deal. How hard is it to shift the transmission anyway? If you can suffer the burden of shifting the gears yourself, you can keep your truck working for you all day, and parked in your driveway at night, and not at the shop.
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Just out of curiosity, I wonder if a guy could reroute to a separate oil cooler.
I’ve never been a fan of the CVT, though the theory is perfect. I think it was Dodge’s first attempt. I was never sold on driving the axles with belts.
I have always wondered if the people who desinged CVT got the Iiea from the old chain drive truck’s from the late 40’s to late 60’s & maybe the 10 speed bycyle’s. & mayby the go cart clutch & combined the three together.
Do any modern CVTs use belts?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that all of them have used steel roller chains for quite a few years.
Nope, hasn’t been used since the demise of the venerable Volvo 340.
That’s what I thought.
Why do some people persist in their belief that rubber belts are involved in the transmission of power on modern CVTs?
Pulley type CVT transmissions use steel belts, roller chains are used with sprockets.
This is a video showing the constuction of a CVT belt;
CVT’s require modern materials to be tough enough for modern vehicles, but the basic design for the CVT traces back to the 15th century, Leonardo DeVinci for example.
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