Top 5 Problems Nissan Murano SUV 2nd Generation 2009-14

Hey, friends, it's Len from 1A Auto. Today, we're going to talk about some of the top five problems that we've found with a Gen 2 Nissan Murano. Let's get into it.

Okay, friends, so we made it inside the vehicle because the first thing that I always like to talk about in these videos is a safety issue. The safety issue in this particular vehicle or at least one of the ones that I've found comes down to the driver side seat. What you might notice with the seat is you're driving along and every time you either accelerate or step on the brake and you shift the vehicle, maybe you could feel the seat kind of shift around a little bit. I'm doing it, of course, with the adjuster, because luckily for us, ours is not broken, but what you might feel is just basically the seat moves when you come to a stop or accelerate. And even sometimes, the seat actually feels like one side moves a little bit, but the other side doesn't. The reason for this is usually because of the actual adjuster underneath the seat. The part where the seat mounts to the floor. And there's going to be a little adjuster in between there, so when you pull up on this lever, you should be able to move it. The problem is, like I said, it likes to adjust itself sometimes or shift around. So, if you were to look underneath the seat right here, you're going to see a couple of channels. They're going to have a channel running along the driver side and along the passenger side of the seat or left and right side. And each one of those channels is supposed to have like a little actuator inside of it that's going to lock in and make it so the seat can't move around. If for some reason inside the channel it got blocked up with something, of course, one side isn't going to want to slide. So, you might try to adjust it, one side doesn't want to slide. Or the little pitons inside there that are supposed to keep it from moving around, for some reason, just don't actuate or set into where they're supposed to be like you think they are and then you step on the brakes or accelerate, and you feel it all of a sudden sink in or click into where it's supposed to be.

So, now, fixes for this, of course, would be get underneath there and take a look. If it looks like it's rusted up because maybe moisture made its way inside here, maybe you left your window down a couple times in a rainstorm, or in the wintertime, you had a lot of slush and snow, it made its way down into the channels and rusted things up. If that's the case, of course, things aren't going to function properly. Other things that might go wrong is maybe the seat bracket itself could have rusted, rotted, or something happened with it and it just actually broke, which is actually pretty common. People will notate that there's an issue with the seating bracket itself, where it's very thin metal and it cracks and breaks. And of course, if any of this is the case, and if it was just dirty or something like that, you could try to clean it out. That would be great if it worked for you. Other times, if something's broken, like I had said, more than likely what you're going to have to do is replace the adjusting unit. And if you do have to replace the adjustment under here, more than likely it's going to be very costly. Some people report it's over $1,000 to go ahead and fix. Want to talk about preventative maintenance, to make sure that this doesn't happen to your vehicle, you could, of course, try to lubricate it. To do that, go ahead and pull up on the adjustment lever and then you can see this rod right here. This is part of the adjustment and it actually runs inside of this area. So, if there's moisture that's captured inside there, it's going to cause an issue. The best thing that you could do is try to add a little bit of lubricant. You can put it right along this area, of course, on the inside if you can get your hands inside there, which is fairly easy. And then coming from the backseat, with the seat all the way forward, you can try to lubricate inside the channel itself.

Now, the second thing that I want to talk about on these vehicles is motor mounts. Some of the symptoms that you're going to notice with a bad motor mount is a thumping, generally felt under acceleration or under shifting when you're under load. Where you're going to feel is generally behind this area kind of where your feet are, kind of near the firewall towards the engine. Now, another symptom that you might notice is if you're underneath the hood, and you're looking at the engine, you might be able to see the engine shifting around too much. Is it going to move around a tiny bit? Yes, it's supposed to because it's rubber-mounted into the vehicle, but it's not supposed to shift around a lot. Now, if we're talking about causes, it always comes down to the motor mounts themselves. There's going to be several on your vehicle, but if you were to look right here, this is a good one to show you because it's right out in the open. If you were to look, you have this metal area that's going to be attached to the body of the vehicle. You're going to have a rubber area that goes in between that area and the area that's mounted to the engine. If this rubber was to break down, get torn, or even just kind of crack to the point where it can move around too much, you're going to start hearing a clunking noise either from here or even in really bad cases if it's completely separated, you might even hear the engine go, boom, slam up against either the firewall or even come forward towards the radiator.

Fixes for this is going to be something fairly simple. What you're going to have to do is replace the motor mount that you find to be bad. Overall, one of the best things to do would be to replace all of those motor mounts at the same time. The reason for that is because more than likely all of your motor mounts are approximately the same age. So, if one goes bad, more than likely the other ones are on their way, especially if the engine is moving around excessively, it's putting excessive wear on those other motor mounts. So, the way that we're going to check this is by doing a brake standing, and you want to do that as safe as possible. So, you need to wear eye protection, of course, at all times. We're going to have the person inside the vehicle put on the emergency brake and they're going to have their foot on the brake at all times as well. At such point, what we're going to ask them to do is put it into drive or even reverse and give it a little bit of gas with their other foot. That's going to make the engine rock from one side to the other or forward to back. So, let's pay attention right here at this motor mount and see what it happens to do. Want to give that a try? So, as you can tell, there's a little bit of movement here. Yeah, that looks good. So, we can see there's a little bit of movement here. Let's go on the other direction. It's important to go in both directions. Moves a little bit this way as well. This isn't very bad at all. That's perfect. Thank you. Okay. So, as we saw, there was a little bit of movement coming from that mount. You're going to want to check all the mounts the same way. Keep in mind that a little bit of movement is fine. The mounts are rubber-mounted, right? The reason why they use rubber in between the two metal parts between your engine and your body, well, you can guess why, your engine causes a lot of vibration. The vibration, of course, would in turn cause more vibration throughout the whole vehicle if there wasn't rubber in between. So, they use rubber. The only problem with that is of course it breaks down over time.

Okay, friends, so we made our way underneath the vehicle, you're going to notice I'm wearing my safety glasses because safety is a number one concern at 1A Auto. For our third problem, if we were to look right up here at the canister, this is part of your evaporative system or part of your emission system for your vehicle. If you were to look right here, you're going to see your EVAP canister vent valve. A symptom that you might notice is really only probably going to be one, and that's going to be your check engine light turns on. So, you're going to get yourself one of these little scanners. These are great by the way, 1aauto.com. And it's going to pull up a code that says P0456, which essentially means there's a very small EVAP leak. One of the first places people might look for that is, of course, at the gas cap, because it's the cheapest fix and it's one of the most common problems when it comes to EVAP problems. Once you check that EVAP leak and you determine that it wasn't actually necessarily the gas cap because you took a look at the O-ring and you saw that it was still in great condition and there wasn't any problems, you would have to continue diagnosing. You can get yourself a smoke machine or something like that, and, of course, that's going to pump a whole bunch of smoke inside of your system and any place that there might be a leak, it's going to come out of. Not everybody has access to that though. So, I wanted to let you know one of the common things that could go bad. If you were to look right here along the canister, this bottom valve right here is your vent valve. What happens with it, and I'll pull it out so I can show you, just push on that tab and you can twist it. We'll pull it right out. I just saw a whole bunch of debris come out. I'm looking at it, and this little seal right here, this is just an O-ring, so we can just pull it right off and inspect it. Hopefully. What happens with these O-rings is they get dry and brittle and sometimes they even crack. What you need to do is check it, give it a nice tug. Make sure it's not breaking in any way. While you're tugging on it, look for any cracks. Sometimes the cracks are going to be small, so you want to pay special attention. Overall, the best thing that you could do is try replacing this. It's going to be the cheapest fix. If for some reason, this does not fix the problem, some people have tried to replace the whole vent itself. You could try that, but, of course, it's mainly going to come down to more than likely just the seal itself. Sometimes when you pull this out, you might notice some debris falling from inside here. And that's because, well, it makes its way down inside there, and then it sits down in there and as we pull it out, you know, crud is just gonna fall out. If there is crud inside there, you just want to replace the whole unit in all honesty.

Now, the fourth thing that I want to talk to you about on these vehicles is a timing chain, guides, and tensioners. Some of the symptoms you're going to notice when these happen to go bad is more than likely a noise. It's going to sound like a ticking or even a rattly noise. Essentially, mostly when you're going to hear it is when the engine is cool and you go to start it up originally. Other things that you might happen to notice is maybe your engine starts running poorly overall. You lose out on a little bit of that power or acceleration, or even you're just kind of happened to notice poor fuel economy. In real extreme cases, what you're probably gonna notice is the engine just doesn't run at all and more than likely, that's due to letting the problem go for too long and you have internal engine damage. So, we should probably talk about some causes about this. More than likely, what it comes down to is poor engine lubrication overall. So, if you keep up on those oil changes or maybe even do them a little bit sooner on this particular type of vehicle, it's probably going to help you out overall. Otherwise, more than likely, it's due to, like I said before, or the original reason why we're doing this problem is because of those timing chains and/or guides. What happens over time is they start to wear down, the timing chain gets a little bit of slack, that's where you're hearing that noise by the way, and, of course, now, your valves and everything aren't opening as they're supposed to be because the timing's off.

So, now, we should probably talk about some fixes because, of course, we need some fixes. If it's just about the noise, you get that little chatter at the beginning, like I said before, keep up on those oil changes or even shorten the length of time between the oil changes. That's going to help with the lubricity and, of course, keep down the wear on the timing chain and the shoes and everything like that. Other than that, if for some reason the noise persisted and it got worse and you had that slacking noise or even runnability issues, more than likely what you're going to have to do is replace the timing chain tensioner with the timing chain guides. And in all honesty, I would replace the timing chain at the same time. Most people say that you don't necessarily have to, but why wouldn't you? You're taking it off anyway and, overall, it tends to stretch. So, if that's the case, something to think about is it's going to be located down here on the passenger side of the engine. This is where all your belts are going to be located. As you can tell, there really isn't very much room. And in all honesty, that right there isn't even where you're trying to get. You need to get behind this area to where the timing chain is. It's actually inside this engine area. So, as you can tell, there's no room to get to that. What would you have to do? You're going to have to get the engine right out of here. In all honesty, that's not something that even I would want to do in the driveway. So, would I say it's something for a novice? No. Only because it's labor-intensive, there's a lot of parts that you're going to have to know about, and of course, how are you going to get the engine out of here?

Now, the fifth problem that I want to talk about on this vehicle is the throttle body. Yeah, this isn't the throttle body for this vehicle, but it is something that I can show you because it's in my hand and it's much easier to see than the one on the vehicle. If you were looking for it on the vehicle, it would be located right back here. I'll reach my hand in and you can see it right there. As you can tell, it's not the easiest to get to. It's not the hardest either though. The problem with these, especially on the Nissans, is that inside here, they get a lot of carbon. You can see all that black? That's buildup. Oftentimes, what people recommend is to try to clean out that buildup. What that's going to do is it's going to help with fuel efficiency, it's going to help with acceleration, and a couple other things. Overall, when you try to clean these down, what's the odds that you're going to be able to get to the backside? It's not very good, is it? Because with having an electronic throttle body like this, if I was to touch on this and try to push it in any way or even try to pry at it with maybe a screwdriver of some sort, I just messed up the calibration that's supposed to go with the motor right here, because this is all electronically done by the computer of the vehicle. Sometimes what happens is when people do clean it down, like I said, they just get the front area here and they think they did a great job. They try driving it down the road and they notice that the idle or the RPMs, which is the speed of the engine spinning/turning, starts to act radically. It goes up and down and up and down, and they're wondering, "What the heck is going on? I just cleaned out my throttle body. Everything should be great." The reason why it's not is because now your computer inside your vehicle is trying to talk to this and this is trying to tell it what's going on and the computer is like, "Well, that doesn't make any sense because you were telling me something completely different five minutes ago." So, the computer has to try to figure out what's going on.

So, now, a great fix for this would be, of course, to carefully remove your throttle body assembly itself. To do that, of course, you would just unbolt it, remove the wiring, and, of course, if there's any hoses attached. At that point, you'll be able to see both sides of it, which really only makes sense because if you clean just the front and you get it nice and clean, what about that backside that you just saw? We're not obviously gonna be able to clean that. So, let's assume that this is still inside the vehicle and it's attached and everything. You're going to take some of your throttle body spray, you're going to spray it right on there. That's great. Then you take a nice brush, maybe you got a toothbrush from whoever. You're going to scrub, scrub, scrub, that's great. You're going to clean it again. And let's say you get it to the point that there's no more black there. The black being the carbon and the debris and everything like that. That's great. Like I said, the backside is still messed up though, right? So, what we need to do is remove it, like I said, so that way there we can get to this. Now, when we're cleaning it, like I said before, you don't want to use anything and try to move this butterfly flap right here. That's what this is. This is controlled by an electric motor inside this area, and if you were to move it without the electric motor trying to tell it to, you could potentially mess up the gearing and, of course, the calibration inside. So, just carefully go ahead and spray it down inside of a nice collection bucket, of course, with all of your safety gear and get it as clean as possible.

So, now, let's assume that you just cleaned up everything so it's nice and pretty. Good job. The next thing that you might notice when you go to start up the vehicle is like I said before, a little bit of an erratic idle. That's because your computer is trying to figure out exactly what's going on because the communication from before compared to what's going on now is completely different. So, it's trying to make sense of it all. What you could do if this was the case is you would have to recalibrate everything. What I would do personally is, of course, I would use a scanner and I can get in there and I can do that. But not everybody has access to a scanner. So, you could disconnect that negative battery terminal, let your car sit for approximately an hour so everything can discharge, reconnect it, and then start up your vehicle and let it run for a while. What you'll probably notice is everything smooths out over a short period of time.

Okay, friends, so we had a lot of fun making this video for you. Hopefully you learned a little something along the way. If you did and you want to talk about it, leave it in the comment section below because I'd love to hear from you. If you like the video, make sure you smash on that like button for me, it would mean the world. While you're at it, why don't you go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell? That way there you can be kept up with all of our latest content. And by the way, if you need any parts, check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.