1995 Nissan Altima stalling

I have a 1995 Altima with 176,000mi that in the last day has stalled on me at two different times. A little background on the events - in both instances, I had been driving on the freeway, approx. 30 miles, and after gettiing onto city arterials and sidestreets, made one or two stops on my way where I had stopped and shut the car completely off. Upon starting up and driving, the car starts to sputter, RPM's go way down, and even when you depress the gas pedal, it is like there is not enough getting to the engine to keep it going, at which point it stalls out. Upon trying to re-start, the ignition turns over, but there is obviously not enough of something getting to the engine. Leave the car be for 5-10 minutes, and it has started again, but while starting, tends to sputter, choke, shudder. Luckily I was dropping the car off this AM to have some brake work done and it stalled as the mechanic was driving me over to my office.

Any thoughts, comments, similar issues, brilliant ideas?

Reply to
elvisruns
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I have been having the same exact problem with my 94 altima se. One day while driving down the highway, it just lost all power so I pulled over and then it would not go over about 2500 to 3000 RPM. It has around the same mileage as yours. I have changed EVERYTHING! I changed the dist cap and rotor, wires and plugs to begin and then the ECM. Then I checked every electrical link, fuse, relay, and resistor on the car. I also checked the computer and it did not seem to be malfunctioning nor did it have any error codes. It still is not working and it has been about three months ( I got soo mad I left it sitting for about a montha and a half :-). I'm ready to get it back on the road again, but can't seem to figure out the problem. I may try changing the O2 sensor next and then the distributor. I found this post from a guy in Hawaii on another site which stated that a seal blew on his distributor and caused similar problems

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I checked mine andnoticed oil in mine as well and the seal was all stretched out and worn,so I may buy a new distributor, but they are like 200 bucks. Have you figured what the problem with yours was yet??

Reply to
mhoule

I am having the exact same problem with my 95 Altima. So far, I have had the distributor and the distributor cap replaced, but with no luck. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Reply to
95altima

Hi

Are you sure it is getting a proper supply of gas? A clogged fuel filter will do this -- usually the car randomly just drops power (it may feel like a slight bucking). Eventually, it will just stall as the filter just doesn't let gas through anymore. Replace it and put some injector cleaner in a full tank of gas.

On one of my previous cars (an old Saab) I eventually found a vacuum leak that was causing this. The hose appeared to be on the nipple but the nipple had clean broken off and was just floating around - It looked right but was floating around just enough to not cause the leak to be huge enough to stall. Be sure to check all your hoses. If you are ever fortunate enough to have the car run badly while you have a chance to look under the hood, you can find something like this by spraying a shot of ether around suspected areas -- oftentimes the car will run normally for a couple of seconds, since the ether drives the air out. Just be careful and not spray it on anything that might be arcing, if you like your eyebrows :)

Hope you guys find the problem. Remco

Reply to
remcow

Thank you for your suggestion.

I don't know if this helps anyone else with the same problem, but I just got the car back from Nissan, and they said that it was definately the distributor and, even though I have had 2 distributors in the past three months, it would need to be replaced. Nissan states that it is "common" for non-nissan brand electronic parts to fail. While this seems odd to me because they said it was not an issue of compatability, I am thinking about putting in a Nissan distributor and hopefully this solves the problem.

Reply to
95altima

Hi

Just curious if you know what went bad in that distributor?

Mechanically, there isn't that much to that assembly so the problem must be electrical. The replacement of a new distributor after three months is stunning to me because I've only had to replace a distributor once (on a 232K subaru DL).

If they happened to have told you, was it a bad ignitor (ICM)?

Regards, Remco

Reply to
remcow

Hello!

No, I will ask. Thank you.

Reply to
95altima

I had the exact same problem, at the first time, the mechanic changed the plugs, wire, and battery which I think are the real solution. At the second time, they found that there was oil in the distributor, they recommended to replace it which it will cost $400, so I did not do it, aftere they cleanedd it, the car runs good, but I found there was oil leaking under the distributor area, which I worried about. I guess the problem still exists. Stupid Nisan desisn, I will never buy Nissan again.

Reply to
blackflyer

I had the exact same problem, at the first time, the mechanic changed the plugs, wire, and battery which I think are the real solution. At the second time, they found that there was oil in the distributor, they recommended to replace it which it will cost $400, so I did not do it, aftere they cleanedd it, the car runs good, but I found there was oil leaking under the distributor area, which I worried about. I guess the problem still exists. Stupid Nisan desisn, I will never buy Nissan again.

Reply to
blackflyer

Pull out the distributor. 2 cent o-ring will fix the problem. Hadthe same problem.

Reply to
FTS

Hi, FTS, I am glad to know that you fixed the oil leaking in the distributor just by replaced the O-ring. currently, my car runs well even in highway after the mechanic cleaned the ditributor, I also opened the distributor, it looks good, I don't really want to spend so much money to replace it which is not necessary, I will check with the mechanic again, thanks for your post.

Reply to
blackflyer

Hi, FTS, I am glad to know that you fixed the oil leaking in the distributor just by replaced the O-ring. currently, my car runs well even in highway after the mechanic cleaned the ditributor, I also opened the distributor, it looks good, I don't really want to spend so much money to replace it which is not necessary, I will check with the mechanic again, thanks for your post.

Reply to
blackflyer

I had the same issue on my '93 Altima. I had to replace the distributor because the original distrubutor eventually leaked oil through the seals. The oil eventually covers the optic eye that tells the engine where it is, in relation to the cylinder firing order. When the eye cannot read the marking, it shuts down.

I bought a refurb unit from Nissan for about $550 CDN.

This solved the problem. My current car has over 285,000 KM's and still going strong.

Reply to
The man

This seems to be a dead topic with no responses since 5/23/05. However, for anyone in the future looking at this, here's my story.

I have a 93 Altima with 162k miles on it. Three weeks ago I was driving my car and after 45 minutes it started sputtering, jerking, bucking (or whatever you want to call it). My car wouldn't run over 3000 rpm and then it declined over the next couple minutes from there. It then died on me and I had to get it towed to a friend's shop. My electrical was fine and my lights didn't dim. The car just stopped running.

We checked the fuel system and everything was fine. Fuel pump worked, I changed the fuel filter just to be certain, and I had 32 PSI over the fuel rail. Funny thing was that after the car cooled down it would run again for almost 45 minutes exactly (within a minute or two) before sputtering out again.

I took it to my friend who's a professional and initially we replaced the spark plugs, wires, and the cap and rotor on the distributor. Cap and rotor were after market (non-Nissan). Car ran fine for a day and then the next morning stopped again in his parking lot after 47 minutes. Took it back into the shop and found that there was no spark going to the wires from the after market cap and rotor. Only after replacing with GENUINE Nissan parts did we get a spark. Car ran fine for a day and then had same problems. The distributor didn't look too bad initially when we looked at it, but that was the final problem.

However, we put in two aftermarket distributors and each lasted for only a couple days before having the same problems return. The final solution was replacing with a new GENUINE Nissan distributor which means I took it in the ass ($460 US). At least we got credit for all the other crappy distributors.

Some people have luck with replacing the O-ring so I would start with that first. However, be advised that my problem (spark and distributor) were only fixed with Nissan parts. All the other research I've done points to this as well. In total, I've put 80k miles on my car in 5 years. When you add this problem expense in, my total expense over 5 years and 80k miles is $1200. Not bad for a used car. I'm hoping to get a couple more years out of it so it's money well spent...for now.

Reply to
ChicagoMatt

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