How to Remove Ambient Air Temp Sensor 2006-12 Nissan Altima

Hey, friends it's Len here from 1A Auto. Today we're going to be working on a 2010 Nissan Altima and I'm going to be showing you how to remove and replace ambient air temp sensor. It's going to be a very simple process and I'm going to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check into 1Aauto.com. We'll be sure to help you out. Thanks for checking in.

All right, so we're going to start removing this bumper cover. It's going to be very simple. I'm going to guide you through it. We're going to start at the top since we're already still on the ground, we're going to remove a couple of these pins right here, here, here, here, here, and here, and then we'll continue on to the next steps. You'll need a couple of basic tools. You might need all or any of these tools, but here we go. Start with the little forky look in one, stick it under here, pry it up. We'll put it someplace safe where we won't lose it. Continue on along the line.

Sometimes these might break. It happens, you can replace it if you want. I'll find that later. Move along here I'm just going to pry up on this a little bit and I can use my fork again. I'm just going to pop it up. These right here are called push clips, so what happens is the center pulls up and it disengages the lock. When you go to put this back in, you push the bottom part in first plugged the hole and then you shove this in and it spreads this and locks it in. Put that aside so we don't lose it. We're going to continue down the line. Just get it started. Use our little fork device here, lift up on that push pin. We're going to continue along, see if we can get under it and onto the next.

Just give it a little tug. Make sure that we got them all out. It's possible to miss one. It happens it's to human nature to make mistakes. I think we're good to move on to the next step, which will be raising the vehicle up a little bit so we can get a look at what's underneath, see what else is holding it on. So one thing that I did want to mention, even though we just finished taking all these out, we'll just put one more in real quick. We'll leave it in there until we've got everything else unattached. So when we're underneath the vehicle we don't have to worry about it coming down and hurting us. So I like to take note that there is a mounting bolt for the bumper cover right under here. It's a simple 10 millimeter head. You can use this ratchet and socket you want or a ratchet wrench, whatever you're into, 10 millimeter. We can go ahead and turn that counterclockwise to reverse it out.

Once we get this completely out, we'll go over the other side of the vehicle we'll move that one the same way. Here's what it looks like. We'll put that safely aside so we don't lose it, and off we go. Next we're going to go ahead and remove our seven millimeter head bolts right here. They come across, they'll come across here if the rest of the splash shield was here, so I can use a ratchet. If you happen to have a little electric gun, that would work as well. Once we get all these off, we can go ahead and remove the push clips, get this right out of the way. Then we can get going on removing the rest of this bumper. You can put a little downward force on it if you want, make sure we're in safety glasses in case anything comes falling down, here we are something fell down.

Now we're clear to start removing these push clips, same as the top and just pull out the top end of it and then the bottom should come out as well. We can use our screwdrivers that we were using before, want to find a little divot. Just want to get it pried up a little bit so we can grab it with our other tool there. So we can continue with our little hook tool if we want or we can go ahead and use some cutters. You might find it easier to just grab onto it with some cutters and pull it out. Grab on you don't need to squeeze too hard. We're not trying to cut it just break it free. Making sure you hold the splash shields so it doesn't fall down and hit you in the face. We're going to do the same for the other ones and come over and grab it with our cutters nice and light. Break it free, separated. That's okay it's going to pull down.

Now we're clear to put these back together and we'll set them aside so we don't lose them. Now we're going to take our Phillips head screwdriver or whatever you might have, but it's a Phillips head on this. We're going to reverse all these bolts or screws. It's going to come right along here. You don't need to worry about those, but right here, right here, right here and then it should come free and we'll go back up top and will dislodge it and should come right off.

The last one, these removed. We're just going to give it a little shake. Okay, we don't want to take it completely off. All right, now we're clear to get back up to the top. We'll take out that one last pin that I showed you leaving in and this should come right off. So we're back up top to our last pin that we pressed in there. We're going to do just like we did before and break free, not like that. At this point once we get this out, the bumper cover might come loose, so you want to make sure you have it secured.

Stuff this up and out. We'll put it over here, grab onto it, it should come free. Now we've successfully removed our bumper cover. All right. You don't necessarily have to remove the bumper cover, but for our video purposes we did it. And also I'd like to note that this is actually all ready broken so I can just pull this down. It's not a big deal. Basically what we're going to do, so we're going to try to push this pin in and then separate it if you need to. You can use a little pocket screwdriver if you have access to one, just push and then pull. Take a look in here. This is your wiring harness. Make sure there's no funny colors, it looks good. And this right here is your ambient air temp sensor. You can remove it from the bracket by using a pair of pliers, squeeze those pins and it should separate. And that's pretty much it for that. And we can go ahead and reinstall a new one.

All right, now we're going to go ahead and put this all back together. If you want you to clip your sensor back into the bracket clips in, nice and firm ours is broken, so it is what it is, but I'm just going to get it up in there. We're going to go with the assumption that it's in nice and sturdy. We're going to take our sensor wire taking note of where the lock is. It's going to line up with that hole. Should clip right in. We heard the clip and that's that. All right, now it's time to install our bumper cover. We're going to be careful not to rub up against our fenders with it unless you don't care about your paint. I'm going to try hard though. See if we can get it settled in nice and easy.

I'll just get that down along there, I'll worry about pressing it in in a minute. Just going to get it lined up along the top here, so we're going to get this lined up. We want to try and get this whole lined up under there. This one went there, this one there and so on. If you need to, you can use a little bit of your body force.

We have two different types of clips here. They have regular push clips and then the locking push clips, you can count them. There's two that are locking for that irregular. They're different sizes. This right here is much wider than the other ones, so they go on the bigger holes. I'm going to put the two, there was one right here and the second one right here. These are the two bigger holes. If you want to, you can latch them down. Not going to worry about it yet.

I'm going to try to get these lined up. Let's give it a little push that locked in. Come on over. The next one should just press in hopefully. Sometimes it's hard getting things lined up. Here it is. Come along we've got two more, two more holes. It's nice. See if I can get it in. If you needed to, you could use maybe a small hammer or whatever you got if you don't have the thumb strength for it. That's okay. All right, so we've got all these now I can go ahead and lock these down simply by pushing in the centers.

We can Line up the bumper along the headlights. Might do a little bit of finagling here and I tried to get it right along the seam of the fender. There's a little lip under there it black. Let's see if we can get it popped in. I was like, we need to give it a little bit of a tug to pull it. Here we go, some brute force. We'll do the same thing for the other side now we'll be clear to lift this up and we can put in our two screws and then go along the bottom and fill those in as well.

All right, so we have our little hidden screw holes here. We've got our ... See if I can get it off. Get our screw. 10 millimeter bolt head case we don't remember that's okay. I'm just going to try and get it lined up. We are only screwing into plastic. Anytime you hear that, just remember you don't have to go super tight. It's just to secure it in. That feels pretty good. We can go ahead and push this up in here and then we're just going to go onto the other side we'll finish up with the bumper skirt, should be be all set.

So here we go. We're going to grab this plastic. It's going to go underneath the plastic of your bumper, your bumper cover I guess. Your bumper would be the metal part. Get that lined up. If these things look like they're misaligned with the holes, they just move fairly easily. Then we can line them up. Take a peek. Of course the first one that I put in moved a little bit. That's okay. Like I said, they moved fairly easily. That looks good now. Okay, take our three Phillips heads on our screwdriver, we're just screwing into plastic so you don't have to go hard like I keep saying, let's get these in, down the line.

There we are now we'll do the same on the other side and we can move on. So we have our splash shield. Let's say for some reason maybe you lost the clips that go up here you lost the pushpins or even you just didn't have any and you just need to replace them. You don't have any of replacements. What we can do is use a couple zip ties and the way we're going to do that, if you have access to something like this, you can go ahead and make a whole something like that. You can use a drill bit if you want to do that. You could use anything that you wanted to use and make a whole really. Very careful use a pocket knife. For me I'm just going to go ahead and use this. I got it nice and hot. I'm going to go like this, just rest it on there.

Make myself a nice little hole, there's one. You don't want to breathing in these fumes. I'm sure it's known at the state of California to cause cancer. Here we are. Now we've got holes. Go ahead and turn this off. Let it finish doing what it's doing. We can smoke clouds. So now we can go ahead and match this up. Bring it up here. It looks fairly good so we can use our zip ties. It's going to be hard getting the first one started and be flopping around. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get us started down here and go through, and I'm going to bring it back through. If you wanted to, you could use bigger zip ties. Something a little stronger might be better for what I'm doing. I'm just going to do this. Let's see. Let's go this way. That makes more sense, doesn't it?

Bring it through. Just get it started. We don't need to tighten it up yet. Now we can just let this hang down. We can grab our other zip ties, continue on and I'll leave them loose until we get in our push pins. Get it lined up with the hole, push it right in. Get our last one, see if we can get it up in there. Take our center push pin. Lock it up in. Here we go. Now we can go ahead and tighten these down. We'll just go down the line. You can leave them down if you'd like that, trim them off if you don't. Looks like a neat little thing, but here we go.

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