It’s a 2008 Altima if that matters. This happened a few weeks ago when doing Door Dash, for about 10 minutes, then it was fine. Tonight it was so sluggish I thought I was going to break down, but I went home to take a break. 2 hours later it was fine the the rest of the night. OH BTW when it was happening, I felt a very slight vibration on the wheel.
Looking online there are several things that could cause this, I guess there is now way to know without taking it to the shop.
I would first connect an OBDII scanner to it to see if there are any codes. Based on the symptoms, though, bad fuel (or water in the fuel) comes to mind. Add a container of STP gas treatment to the gas tank.
Sounds like a clogged fuel filter. Check the air filter too while you are at it.
No Engine Light illuminated? I would expect it to at least flash while the car was sluggish.
How many miles on the vehicle? It’s 14 or 15 years old at this point. There really isn’t an engine component that would not be suspect after all these years. I agree with Crafter_Man in that an OBDII scan would be my first thing to do.
That’s what I was thinking as well.
However, that it happens after the car warms up and goes away after it cools off would have me looking into a possible vacuum leak. There may be something that expands/shifts when warm that opens a gap somewhere and allows air into the system, bypassing the MAF/MAP.
There’s a number of ‘tricks’ to test this theory (a common one being to spray something flammable like brake cleaner in certain areas to see if the engine revs), but connecting it to a scanner that reports fuel trims would be a good way to do it as well. High Long Term Fuel Trims could point to unmetered air entering the system and the car attempting to fix it by adding more fuel.
Of course it could also be something like a problem with an O2 sensor or so many other things.
I’ll third getting it scanned to see if anything shows up.
Even better, have someone clear the codes, then drive it for a few days and rescan it. A 15 year old car is bound to have some unrelated codes stored in it already.
First and easiest is to check the air intake where air comes into the engine. The vehicle should have an air box that you open up and the air filter is there. Pull the filter out and look at it. It might be clean, it might be dirty enough to change but not enough to be the source of your problem.
Or you may open up that air box and find that a squirrel has filled the entire thing with acorns.
And if it appears something has been in there (particularly if there’s any holes in it), pull out the MAF or MAP sensor and check it for debris. A mechanic youtuber that I watch has tracked problems down to a single piece of fuzz on the sensor (which I can’t find the video for at the moment). All kinds of things are going to go wrong if the engine is ingesting more or less air than the MAF or MAP is reporting.
I would also suspect a vacuum issue. But if you’re not already handy at doing your own car repair, I probably wouldn’t recommend trying to fix this sort of problem on your own. Vacuum problems are somewhat tricky and may involve lots of hunting and pecking to figure out the source of the leak. And in an older car, you may cause more vacuum leaks from messing around with vacuum lines that are old and crack easily.
One simple thing you can try when this happens is to turn off the car for a few minutes. Sometimes the computer can’t figure out the air mix (from a vacuum leak or whatever) and it causes this behavior. Stopping and starting the car will restart the computer and it may drive fine again.
Do get your codes checked out. Many auto parts stores will check your codes for free.
I just want to point out that if this is a vacuum issue, or a fuel filter issue, or an air filter issue, or likely any other issue that would affect the driveablilty, in a 2008 or later model it would have definitely set OBDII codes. This would probably have illuminated the Check Engine Light, but even if it was transient, it would have stored codes that can be retrieved with an very inexpensive code reader. Most Autoparts stores will scan for these codes free of charge, although they may not be able to help you interpret them. That is what the internet is for.
Get the trouble codes, post them, and then you have a much more likely chance of getting helpful information.
was at the Auto Zone to get a scan but their scanner didn’t work. Then I could barely get out of the parking lot, griding noise from front of car. Luckily was only 100 yards from Walmart service center so didn’t have to wait over an hour for AAA. I usually go to another garage but Walmart is first come first serve so maybe they can stark work first thing Tuesday.
It seems possible causes for this are brake pads or drums, CV joint, or god forbid the transmission