Even our guest consumer tester said, “It feels like I’m hurting the car.”
NISSAN QQ 2015 DRIVERS
For context, lest you think I’m overly sensitive, each Challenge judge reports three likes and three dislikes for each car, and all five of our drivers gave one of their dislike slots to the Altima’s noise. Would it not be a better car with slightly lower mileage and lower noise? I suspect our judges would say yes. With numbers this high, and close to each other, my question is whether the Altima’s mileage win is worthwhile. (The Volkswagen Passat was closest with 32.1 mpg and the Mazda6 was in third place with 31.7 mpg.)
Though the Honda Accord shares that combined mpg estimate, in our real-world mileage test the Altima clocked 32.4 mpg and the Accord got 30.2 mpg. Its EPA-estimated gas mileage is 27/38/31 mpg city/highway/combined. The tragedy here is twofold: First, once the Altima gets its shoes laced up it proves to have stout, if noisy, power. I get the point, but I often found the shift to be abrupt - adding the feel of an unrefined conventional transmission to an unrefined CVT. I experienced it with the CVT in the Sport mode, marked Ds on the shifter. Nissan attempts to familiarize the experience by programming in some artificial shift points whereby the CVT makes more pronounced ratio changes, emulating a step-gear transmission. Here the resulting engine drone is loud and seems constant, even compared with other four-cylinder/CVT pairings. CVTs characteristically allow engines to rev to speeds that don’t seem appropriate to the driver, simply because they try to keep the engine in its most efficient range, not its quietest. More troubling to our drivers, though, was the noise. A little bit of this is normal, especially among CVTs, but the degree here evokes a motorboat analogy, where the boat’s propeller needs to churn some water before the boat really takes off. Specifically, there’s often a delay in response when you step on the pedal before the Altima pulls forward - or speeds up proportionally when already in motion. While CVTs aren’t inherently flawed, the Altima’s still exhibits some of the technology’s earlier drawbacks, which have been tamed in similar CVTs - including those in our test’s Honda Accord and Subaru Legacy. Rather than fixed gears, CVTs use a belt and a pair of pulleys that change their diameter to provide a broad range of gear ratios with no conventional shift sensation. The Nissan Altima took its lumps regarding acceleration related to its continuously variable automatic transmission, called Xtronic - the only transmission offered. The Altima’s ride quality passed muster, though it wasn’t among the top-rated.
NISSAN QQ 2015 DRIVER
One driver needed to slow down on curvy roads the other cars had handled at speed. In our Challenge the car had the lowest numerical rating for handling, and judges cited a tendency to wander and a need for constant correction. But drivability is where the Altima stumbles. Granted, the experience of driving a midsize sedan doesn’t, well, drive many buyers. (For all-wheel drive, consider the Chrysler 200, Ford Fusion and Subaru Forester, the latter of which has it standard.) Trim levels include base, S, SV and SL, the higher three of which are offered with an optional 3.5-liter V-6 that changes the trim name to 3.5. Our Nissan Altima test car was a 2.5 SV with the standard 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine. In one of the most competitive classes in the car market, the generally capable 2015 Nissan Altima is hamstrung by subpar drivability - an unrefined transmission and associated engine noise. Two model years after bringing up the rear in a comparison of midsize family sedans, the 2015 Altima has again faltered in the $27,000 Midsize Sedan Challenge - despite its success as the third-best-selling midsize sedan in the U.S.
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