Yesterady, ironically enough on my way to a local shop to bring my friend to pick up his truck my 2003 G sedan A/T deicded to make a loud clunk of some sort and then engine light came on and would barely move. The RPMs were revving but it took a lot to get it moving. The only potential warning sign is there was a burning smell in the cabin that I could not smell outside the car as I thought it was maybe brakes or something but could really only smell it real well when I open the trunk. I thought maybe my aftermarket amp was on the outs as the smell was going for the last 2 weeks. I do not know if the smell and the failure are related or pure coincidnece. I have the car in the shop now and they are looking at it now as we speak so hopefully I will be able to report back with failure codes but i wanted to get the ball rolling here. I am hoping to be prepaired so the shop doesnt **** all my money away by going way out into left field. My first thought was my tranny blew or the differential blew and thats why it would rev high but move very slow. My thought though was that I wind hear some type of whining or grinding or something if my tranny or diff was going to blow. Tell me your thoughts and in the mean time I hope to be reporting back in the next couple hours with some failure codes.

Thanks in advance!!

 

The code that came back is P1730 which says something about the transmission interlock. Now they drove the care and had no issues aside from a loud clunk in the rear. That clunk he believes is the differential. When the failure happened to me it went into the limp-home mode. The shop beleives these are 2 seperate issues which I find hard to believe. Tell me your thoughts... anyone know how difficult it is to rebuild the rear diff on a 2 wheel drive sedan?

 

that sounds more like one of the solenoids in the trans isn't working right. The diff in the rear is purely mechanical.

 

Yeah I was thinking the same thing. The car is driving perfectly fine now. If it were the diff it wouldn't stop clunking. To be honest my guess is the clunking the mechanic heard was a 7up bottle rolling around my trunk. He only heard it on take offs from a stop.

Anyone know how hard it is to access the valve body to troubleshoot the valves?

 

Just drop the transmission pan and the vb is right there.

 

If it's driving fine now, you may have just had a bit of old trans fluid gum up something in the transmission briefly. How often have you changed fluids in it? How many miles do you have. It's probably a good idea to drop the pan, replace the filter in there (you'll notice in the service manual that changing this filter is never mentioned, but if you drop the pan, replacing it should be easy), and clean out any gunk in the bottorm of the pan. There's 10 years of gunk built up in there so expect a messy job.

Alternately, you could just keep flushing new fluid in it repeatedly. The matic S fluid is expensive so this might not be the cheapest thing to do either.

 

Nissan recommends changing trans fluid every 30K miles. If you live in a warm climate in the south/western United States you should cut that in half for the health of your trans. Our ATs have no filter, normal trans service is just remove/replace the fluid. Since you've never serviced your trans dropping the pan is a smart idea to remove the old gummy residue!
Gary

 

Is it that we don't have a trams filter or just no serviceable filter? Anyone flush their own? I'm curious how much of the fluid people have been able to get out by just dropping the pan. Also is the gasket reusable? Lastly does it make sense to start replacing solenoid or wait and see if it comes back?

 

I took a look at the service manual, Gary is correct, there is no filter (I must have been confused with a different car) Anyways, yes, I do my own trans fluid exchange on my G35. you get approx 4 quarts of fluid out of the pan. The system holds almost 11 quarts. I measure the amount of fluid that I get out and put that exact amount back in.

The service man says not to reuse the gasket.

If I were you, I'd just keep flushing new fluid in and see if it the problem comes back. to replace almost all your fluid i think you'd have to exhange out 4 quarts about 5 times to have roughly 80-90% new fluid in there.

 

This is interesting because I just ordered the new gasket and the parts store said that it only comes I'm the filter kit.... http://m.oreillyauto.com/mt/www.orei...3230&ppt=C0023

Now I'm really confused :/