New Infiniti G35 owner! Few questions/issues so far.
 

Hi guys! I'm a new 2006 Infiniti G35 owner! It has 132k miles on it (I know, I know) ... it was a lease car from what the Carfax reported. But I won at an auction for an awesome price! Oh, the car is a sedan in a pearl white color too. This G35 was always my dream car!

I'm only 19 years old, but my past car I owned for a year was 1999 Lexus RX300 ... but considering it looked like a mommas car and the fact I need no need to drive an SUV, I sold it and got this! My parents owned a 1995 Infiniti J30 back in the days, which is why I'm in love with Infiniti & Nissan as well.

Enough with the story, now on to the real deal.

Questions:

1.) Considering this car has 132,000 miles, what should I look into to? The last Carfax report was at 116k miles for an oil change and that is the last thing that was reported. So I guess I'll have my fellow mechanic look at the fluids, spark plugs, struts, etc. (P.S. I'm on a low budget now) =/

2.) The 6 disc CD changer doesn't work! Each time I start the car, it makes noises for the first few seconds. I try to load a CD but the thing doesn't open and the "LOAD" letters go away on the screen after a few seconds.

From past experiences though, Bose has been a piece of **** on my parents past cars! (Infiniti J30, Nissan Murano) ... both CD players failed. And now it happened again.

3.) The car doesn't have an AUX input. On my past Lexus car, I used a tape player that connected to my Android headphone jack. Are there anyways I can put one without removing the whole set or buying an fm transmitter (horrible sound quality)?

4.) It looks like this car had a SAT radio on before because it has the antenna on the top and when I looked in the glove box, I found an XM remote. So what would I need to do to hook it up again? Does any XM radios come with AUX inputs too?

Issues:

1.) When I open up the engine, it's hard to open it because it hits my fenders or w/e they're called! Some of the paint is already chipped off! Now I read by searching on the forums that it's an alignment issue on the hood? Is there a DIY on fixing this or would somebody explain a fix to this?

Thank you very much guys.

Kind regards,
NyCrAzY

I would consolidate all of your audio questions and answer them by recommending that you get an aftermarket head-unit. I hate the look of them, and never thought I'd have one, but the head-units in our cars are crap. You can find a CD changer in a junkyard or on slidegood for a few hundred bucks, but the ribbon cable that connects it WILL break either when you connect it or a few years later when you hit a random bump on the highway. An aftermarket headunit would also allow you to do everything you want from satellite radio to CDs and android devices and anything else.

If you don't take my advice and still want an aux input check out the following: http://www.myg35mods.com/tutorials/aux/index.html
The PAC device will have aux input AND satellite capability, but I don't think you want satellite. You mentioned being on a budget, and satellite has a monthly fee and sounds HORRIBLE. You could just use your android device to stream pandora or something with much better sound quality.

Obviously this is pretty much all opinion, but it is based on a ton of research I've done previously.
Congrats on the car.

Thanks man!

I was looking into double dins but the fact that I need to buy another headunit is.kinda expensive for me!

Is satellite radio really horrible quality?

Yes. Let me introduce the following by mentioning that I used to work in television production so I may have a more critical ear than most.

Satellite radio is being broadcast to you in a digital signal and the marketing seems to suggest that digital is somehow automatically great quality and that is simply false. While the equipment they use to broadcast is quite advanced and certainly capable of producing incredible sound, their current set-up is producing sound which is always below CD quality and usually below FM quality. Sirius merged with XM not long ago and each company had a few satellites in orbit (about 4 each). Each satellite is capable of sending a certain amount of information to earth at a time. If each satellite was tasked with sending one station, you would have incredible quality. Instead, they want to offer hundreds of channels. To do this, they reduce the bandwidth of each station greatly. This directly reduces the quality as they have to compress the signal. Sirius XM has never made public (at least that I have been able to find) the technical data on their stations. You should find this suspicious. They are trying to keep secret the truth about how low the bandwidth of their stations really is. In fact, the bandwidth from one station to the next is different. Some in the industry even believe that the bandwidth is different at different times of day (rush hour etc.).

Satellite radio is just under $20 a month. They offer you a deal to buy a year at a time but before even considering that kind of dive, I would recommend you call up your nearest rental car place and rent a car with satellite radio. Put in a CD and compare it to what you hear on satellite. I bet you'll never consider satellite again.

That's probably more info than you wanted, but I'm a radio nerd and can't help it.

As for the double din, if you don't want bluetooth or GPS you can get some great deals on them. Look around online, you can even pick up a used one. I would be willing to bet that now that you don't want satellite, you can use the money you were going to spend on that and get a double din. Especially if you're willing to settle for the Metra kit instead of the JDM double din, you can get away for a couple hundred.

In my car I installed the GROM audio bluetooth kit, and it work perfectly. I can connect to my Iphone via bluetooth and the sound is perfect. Also by doing this I kept the clean OEM look. IF your interested either google the company or looked it up on EBay. I paid around $150 i believe for the whole unit and it took me about an hour to install everything. Also it comes with a microphone for hands free calls as well. Good luck with the car and enjoy it.

To answer your question about the hood, yes it is a pain in the *** on Gs. I went and bought new hinges because I think its the actual hinges that go bad, mine was actually starting to bend my fender! Make sure you lube it up. I always ask for those hinges to be lubed when I get my oil changed.

How much are the hinges? Is there a DIY for this?

It already started to scrape off a lot of my paint :(

I just left it for my paint shop to do at the same time I was getting my bumper mounted and painted, it looks to me like you would have to take the fenders off, but Im not sure.

I think once the hinges go though, they cant be repaired. I tried to bend them back into shape, and bend them outwards, didnt make it any better, maybe worse.

Get them fixed soon or the issue will only get worse...before I replaced mine they got so bad that opening the hood was a 2 person job...one person lifting, one person pushing the hood away from the fender so that the fender didnt get any worse (It was bent upwards already)

Wow ... what a flaw by Infiniti. Last thing I want to do is to replace the fender! I'll have to check how bad the hinges are.

Are the hinges fixable by just replacing them?

I called my local Infiniti dealership located in Tysons Corner, VA and he said they don't do any body work.

He recommended me a body shop across the street that does Infiniti certified work. So on my day off, I will have to let them check it out.

I'm too scared to go to oil change places and whatnot now because they won't be aware of the problem and when they open up the hood, things will just get worse.

It fixed my problem. Im not sure exactly how they break, but when you look at it you can tell its a problem just waiting to happen. The hinge is designed with a bend in it, its very long, and it has a lot of moment force on it.

If you need to get your oil changed, just offer to open the hood yourself, or let the people know.

If you're handy, you should be able to DIY fix it. But you're going to have to paint them first so they dont rust.

I am taking the car to an auto body shop to get it checked out ... just hoping they dont quote me a ripoff price.

Yeah rust is the #1 thing i am afraid of now

The hinges are like $25 bucks per side. I believe that you have to remove the fenders to replace them. The trick seems to be lubing them frequently to avoid bending/breaking them.