2020 Nissan Frontier, less than 48k miles. Started hearing a faint ticking while driving home today. The truck made a squealing sound and shuddered twice, about a fraction of a second in duration and about a second apart a couple of miles from home, about a half hour after the ticking sound started.
Got home, left the engine idling and opened the door and the soft ticking became a loud knock. It sounded more like a collapsed lifter but this engine does not have hydraulic lifters. I opened the hood, the knocking sound seemed to come from the heads if you stood on the side of the truck and from the intake manifold if you stood in front. Really could not pinpoint the origin of the sound.
Got online in a Nissan Frontier forum and there have been quite a few members of the forum that have reported spun rod bearings in these engines with build dates of 08-20 and 09-20. Mine is 08-20.
I wonder if Nissan will work with me on this? I declined the extended factory warranty, never needed one and don’t know anyone who ever needed one, except for one guy who did get the extended warranty but the dealer did not honor it because he had modified the exhaust. The turbo blew on his vehicle.
All you know for sure when you buy an extended warranty, is you’ve “spent” the money for the warranty. Doesn’t mean you’ll ever need/use the warranty, or if the warranty will actually cover any issue you may have.
Sure, call Nissan and ask if they have any kind of goodwill coverage for this scenario. Can’t hurt.
I looked up complaints and manufacturer communications for your truck at NHTSA.gov. There are none related you your issue. Nissan may agree to work with you in this problem, but it isn’t widespread enough to have showed up on the NHTSA website. Carcomplaints.com shows no similar complaints. You are guaranteed to get no support if you don’t contact Nissan, so why not do it?
Also, with a build date of 8/2020, that seems more likely part of the 2021 MY production run.
Yeah, I actually did not know that until I puled out the warranty book today. The Monroney sticker only showed the 3 year, 36k miles bumper to bumper warranty. I read the owners manual cover to cover when I bought the truck but never looked at the warranty booklet.
Nissan was going to come out with the Gen 3 Frontier in 2020. I heard somewhere that it would look like the Navara which is the Frontier sold to the rest of the world. But someone in the Nissan hierarchy thought the 3rd gen Navara didn’t look aggressive enough and wanted the third gen Frontier to look more like a Tacoma.
Anyway, the 3rd gen Frontier was initially moved to 2021. The 2020 got the third gen drivetrain though which includes the 3.8 DI engine (direct injection) and the 9 speed transmission. The 2021 model was cancelled and they continued to produce the 2020 right up until the release of the gen 3 Frontier in 2022.
However, sales of the 2020 started dropping in the MY 2021 because no one wanted to buy a 2020 model in 2021, so suddenly around April of 2021, Nissan began labeling the new trucks 2021. When I bought mine, I got it about $5500 below MSRP where the identical trucks with the 2021 label were going at MSRP. Then the chip shortage hit and my truck was suddenly worth almost $10k more than I paid for it, literally 2 weeks after I bought it, it shot up in value.