How to Replace Side Rear View Mirror 2007-12 Nissan Altima

Hey, friends. It's Len from 1A Auto. Today I'm going to be working on a 2010 Nissan Altima. We're going to be doing a very simple job: replacing a driver-side door mirror. If you need these or any other parts, you can always check in with 1A Auto and check us out. Thanks.

Here we go. We're going to get inside this door panel so we can see what's going on in there. First thing I like to do is I like to get behind here. This is where the handle is. This is a little cover right here. It should just pop right up, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a small screwdriver. I'm going to see if I can pry it up, pop it out. Okay. Behind here, you'll notice there's a Phillips-head screw, so I'm going to turn that to the left, remove that.

Then I'm going to come over here. I'm going to try to remove this little cover or armrest, I should say. I'm going to use something plastic, try to pry. I'm not trying to use something metal because I don't want to chisel up the rest of our door, so here we go. Phillips-head right here. There we are. That's what it looks like. We can set that aside so we won't lose it. Then take a look. There's nothing else back there that could hold this door panel on, so we'll move along.

We're going to take this off now. I'm going to use something like this. Okay, I'm going to come right here and see if I can pry it up. Okay, it's pretty tight. I'm going nice and slow because there are clips under here that I don't want to break. If something breaks, well, you break it, you bought it, right? I'm just going to go along. Once I get all this up, I'll show you where all the clips are so you can see why I'm trying to take it slow. Let's see if I can grab it. There we are. It feels like maybe one more. There we are. Okay, so you can see we have all these slots right here, and we've got all these clips. These clips are what was holding it in. This one was the main one. That one goes in here. That's why I was trying to start there first, get this undone. That way, there I can lift up, go along the line and unclip all these. All right? We'll set this aside.

Now we're going to take a look. We want to see what could be holding this plastic door panel onto the inner part of the door. It looks like we might have a screw here, screw there. Looks like a Phillips-head or a 10-millimeter depending on what you have access to. Since we already used a Phillips-head, we're going to go with the assumption you have access to a Phillips-head. I'm going to turn that to the left. This is a ratcheting screwdriver. It's wonderful. Electric screwdriver would be even nicer. I'm just going to pull this out. There we are. Grab that second one. There we are, same size as the other one. We don't have to worry about mixing those up, but they are quite a bit longer than this one.

Now what I like to try to do, I'm going to see if I can pull up on this. If it doesn't feel like it wants to come up, we could even just try to take the door panel off first and try to take a peek behind there. There is going to be wiring, obviously. These are switches, so they must have electrical current going to them or from them. Okay? Something to pay attention to as well is there is a light down here, which also means that it has electrical current getting to it, so there's going to be wiring here. There's going to be wiring here. When we pull off this door panel, it's going to come off on the bottom this way and then, up a long the top, there's a little ridge that it sits down onto, so when you get to the top, we're going to come popping, popping, pulling out, and then it's going to come out and up this way to come off. All right?

I'm going to grab my little tool again. You can use one that's a little thicker, one that's a little thinner, whatever you want to use, but I prefer to use plastic on this rather than metal just so I don't mess up my door panel too much. This one might not be in the best condition, but we'll just try to do it right. I'm going to try to come in. I'm going to try to pry away. Okay. See if I can find approximately... All I'm trying to do is get in between the door and the panel. Okay? Going to turn my head around just so I can get my head down in here a little bit better.

Okay, so I can look down through here. I can see there's a clip. Here we are. Here's one removed. I'm going to bring it down along here. Here we are, another one. Another one's right here. Here we are. I'm just pretty much following the door panel around the door. This kind of tells me where all the little clips are. Okay, I'm going to come up this side. Feels like there should be one right about here somewhere. There we are, bringing it up. Okay. There we go. Pull this away.

Now we could see our wiring and our cables, so we want to make sure we disconnect all this stuff. We want to try to avoid any tugs on wiring. If you pull out any wires from any switches or harnesses, well, we're going to have bigger issues. I could show you how to fix it all, but let's not do that today. Let's just get the part done that we're trying to do. I'm going to try to take a look under here, see if I can take this off real quick. Just using my small screwdriver.

Okay, we got a little electrical connector here, going to see about pushing that in, lifting it up and out. We're going to come in from behind here, try to take a look at what we're dealing with. All right. We've got two cables. If you wanted to, you could mark them to try to remember which one's which, or you can just remember the top that comes out the top right here comes to the top up here. Okay? That's pretty easy to remember, so we'll just go with that. You could use something like a crayon.

That just pops right out of there. There's a little lip right here or a little, well, you can call it what you want. Think of what you want to call it. Call it that. That slides into this hole right here. Okay? If we were installing it, we would slide the little tip into that hopefully. It's lubricated, so it's hard to hold on to. Basically, it slides right in there and then slides like that, and it locks it in. Then, if you want to lock it back in... Okay? We're going to be installing it again later anyway, so here we go. I'm going to pull this one out as well, trying to be careful not to break the latch. There we are. This one's a little bigger, no real nub, just a big old circle. Okay.

Now we've got the door panel. We're going to try to keep pulling it away but not putting too much tug pressure on this. If you need more slack, you can go ahead and pull these little pins out of the door and try to give yourself more slack. I'm just going to try to do it the way that it is. This one right here, there's a little push pin. I'm going to try to push that in, pull this out. Always check your electrical connectors. I'm going to skip saying it on every one, but I'm going to say it for this one. Check all your electrical connectors as you pull them off. Make sure there's no funny colors, green, blue, red, rust, anything like that. If there is, you're going to need to do something about it. Okay?

Let's see. I'm going to try to find the prong on this one. Feels like it's probably on the back side. Here it is right there. All I did was come around from the back side with my finger, squeeze on it, pull down. Okay? Can't really see that because it's in here, but it's very simple. You just grab it with your index, pop it out. Okay?

This one, going to take a look at it. How does it go in? Don't mind me hitting my head. I'm going to try to push, see if I can see it. There we go. Can you see it better now? I can see it better now. Here's our little push. We're going to try to push that in and pull out our electrical connector, so we can use our small screwdriver if we want. Pull that out, take a peek. Looks good.

All right, so we got the door panel out of the way. Some people might say that you don't necessarily have to take the door panel off to get to this but, theoretically, it's a little easier. You're just going to pull this off, just a little cover. The reason why you have to pull off the door panel, or at least it seems that you do, is because the door panel would come across here, I think even up this high, so you would have to pull the door panel away and then try to somehow weasel this out. You could cause breakage. You could snap this. It's completely up to you want to do, your prerogative. It only takes a little bit of time to do this.

We'll get this out of the way. We have a little electrical connector right here. I'm just going to push down on the tab, pull it out. We always check our electrical connectors, make sure there's no funny colors. Looks great. Next what we'll notice is there's three 10-millimeter nuts right here. Okay? What I'm going to do is I'm going to go around to the other side of the vehicle so I can hold the mirror. Then I'm going to come around this side with my arms, and I'm going to remove these three screws. What I can actually do now, since I'm sitting here, I can take out two and leave the third for later, so that is what I'll do.

Just go ahead and do this like this so I can see everything. Just going to leave it in a little bit. I'm holding on to the mirror so I don't drop it. It's fragile equipment. We've got our three nuts. Now I'm going to take my mirror assembly. I'm going to gently move it up and down. You can hear the seal. There we are.

Here we go. It's time for the install. We've got our three nuts, yeah? Got our three studs, this little mirror wiring here. We're going to try to get everything lined up, see if I can put it through the hole. Here we are. I got my window down a little bit, so that's nice. Get in here. I'm holding the mirror this whole time just in case that happens with all three of them. Here we are. We'll just grab our third one, get this started on there. We got our last one. That's snugged. Very nice. Grab my tool. Got it in my pocket here someplace, I think. I don't know where. There it is. Who needs a cart? Just going to snug it up. We don't want to break these studs out of the mirror. There we are. Take this and go ahead and plug it back in.

We've got our cover. This just covers over everything, right? Little clip right here, it's going to go into this hole. Okay? This one right here is going to try to go into this hole, try, and that's going to try to go into there. We'll see. Here we go. That lined up. That one lined up. See if I can push it in. Push it in. There we go.

These are all where our little prongs went into. You see anything that looks like this, this should be in the door. That just pulls right out. We'll check them all. It looks like we've only got one in here still. We're going to take our door trim tool, try it from whichever way you want but, essentially, we just want to be able to pull that out. See if I can get it. There we are. Okay? I'm going to put this right inside our door panel. We'll find the one that it came out of, bottom corner. It's got a little thick opening here. That goes right there, so I'll just try to slide it in. There we are. Make sure all these are still in. Okay, everybody looks good. It's perfect. Let's get this up here.

We're going to make sure we take this wiring. We're going to put it down through this hole. That's where the little light's going to be. You don't want to forget that because it's going to be hard to get it back out someday. All right, now we can start connecting everything else if we want. We could do these up here or these down here. I'll start at the bottom and continue my way up to the top. We got the one for our window. Here we are, the center one. That's the power for everything. Got our little lock switch, right? Actually, this one right here looks like it's for the window or the mirrors, left and right, blah, blah, blah, so there's that. That's what that one was. Perfect.

All right, so we've shaken it around. We're going to look back down here. This came out. Might have to put it back in again. Who knows? It just wants to be out, but we want it to be the way we put it, so keep grabbing it, keep giving it a tug. Get it back out there. Obviously, you don't want to yank it right out of the thing. I'm going to try to hold it up against here.

Now I'm going to grab our cables, hopefully remember which way they go. Top is on the top. Bottom is on the bottom. I got my bottom one. I'm going to go right inside this hole right here. We got a round with a round hole. I'm going to put it in, go over, and I'm just going to push it in. Let's see if it'll go. There it is. Take our top one, bring it back around.

We got our little nub. Little nub goes inside that nub hole. See if we can get it. There it is. Just going to get that into the slot. Just want to make sure it's in all the way. It's not. If it isn't and it falls out, you'll have issues, so just take your time. Make sure you do it right. Gonna try to spin it. Sometimes they can be a little bit of a pain. There it is. Perfect, so we don't have any more wiring in here. We can look down in. We know we got everything connected.

We still got our little wire hanging out the bottom. We got little extra pieces. Just going to go like this. Gonna start it in along the top. There's a little ridge that runs along here. That's going to sit inside this ridge right there. Okay? Once we get it sitting down on there, we can let go of our panel. Double check for our little wire, still there. It's looking good. Nice. Now we'll just go ahead and we'll take this, and we'll bonk it in going all the way around.

Double checking we've got our wire down here, looks good. I'm going to start at the top. I'm going to just get going across this like this, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I want to go around. All right? I'm making sure that this is pressed down as far as I can go. Give it a little shake. Feels good. Very nice.

We can go ahead and put in our screws. We got the short one there. We're going to have two long ones, one there and one there. I'm using my Phillips-head. I'm turning these clockwise. If you wanted to, you could use a 10-millimeter. If you notice that you were trying to tighten these down and, for some reason, the Phillips-head kept sliding off or bouncing off or it seemed like it was stripping, you would want to make sure you use the 10-millimeter. To help prevent your Phillips-head from stripping, you can just press in at the same time. There we are. I got my last one, the short one. Remember, it goes in behind here. You can go that way or just go right up along the top. We'll go this way. There we are.

Now, before we go too far, we want to make sure we test everything, right? We don't want to put everything together and then have to take even more apart, but we do need to have all this stuff in just to make sure that everything's secure enough to use. Now we're going to try the window. I got the key power on, so we could try going down a little bit. Seems pretty good. Go up. Very nice. Go down, stop, up. Perfect. I like to leave my window down when I'm working just in case I happen to close the door and it might be locked for some reason, not going to lock myself out.

All right, so let's move along. I've got this little cover, might go here. Doesn't go there. Goes over here. We'll look at real quick. We'll see we got a little tab right here. We got a little push tab right there. This one right here, obviously, isn't a push tab. It needs to go in first and then push the back side in. Okay? I'll just pull this away. I'm going to put it in that little slot right there. Just try to see if I can push this in. If it doesn't seem like it wants to click in, that's okay. There we are. That seems good. That's in there nice and flush. We can move along.

We can go ahead and do our armrest. We notice we've got all these holes going along here, right? That's where all these are going to clip into going along the line. I'm just going to take it, going to line it up. Yeah. Going to see if I can get them all popped in. Looks like it needs to go a little bit more on the back side here. See if I can get it. Should have started with the back, so I'll just lift it back up, see if I can get it started in. Something's going on. Got this little tab right there. If it doesn't seem like it wants to go in because the tab's bending out, it's very common. It's okay. We'll just use our small screwdriver again. It's a very handy tool. We'll push it in. Push it in. Okay? Just going to come down the line.

Okay, so we've got our little connector. We can see where the little lock tab is. We've got our connecting connection area over here. The lock tab goes on this side right here where my finger is, so I'm going to go ahead and line those up, clip it in, right? We've got a couple little tabs here, and then we've got our under tabs or whatever I guess you'd call them. These ones will slide in, but these need to go in first, so I'm going to go like this. There's a couple little holes under here. I'm going to line up those tabs with my holes. Just going to lift it up, click it in. All right, door panel's on.

Now we've completed our job. Great job, everybody.

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