First Used Car

In My Humble Opinion
1

So after leasing for more than 15 years, I bought a used car. It’s a 2005 Nissan Murano SL. The car had one single owner who put 66,000 miles on it. All service was done at the Nissan dealer. I didn’t want to get such an old car, but it looks great and I got it cheap.

Not having owned a car before, 66,000 seems like an awful lot of miles. I drive about 50 highway miles roundtrip to work each day. Any tips on making this car last as long as possible? It’s in great condition and I’d love to drive it for the foreseeable future and not have a car payment.

2

Oil changes. Relatively cheap and good, clean oil protects the most expensive part of the vehicle.

3

That is the one thing I know to do!

4

Is the owner’s manual still in the glove box? If it is, there you go. In addition to oil in the motor you also need to change oil in the transmission on a regular basis along with filters.

5

66,000 miles for an 8 year old car is very low. That averages out to a little over 8,000 miles a very so far which is well below average (average is about 15,000 miles a year). I wouldn’t worry about the miles or the age too much as long as it was well-maintained. It still has over half of its useful life left even conservatively estimating and maybe much more. Continue with the recommended maintenance schedule but you shouldn’t need to do more than that. As noted, oil changes are the most important part of those but other things like rotating the tires every 5 - 10 thousand miles will help make it more trouble free.

It sounds like you are going to be driving it many more miles per year than it has been driven so far. There is no problem with that but you are going to pass the 100K mile mark less than 3 years from now so follow the maintenance schedule now so it will still be relatively trouble free as a 100 - 200K mile car as well.

6

Good advice, thanks.

7

This is probably a dumb question, but I know nothing about cars. When I take the car in for an oil change, do I need to ask for the oil in the transmission to be changed also? Filters?

8

The owner’s manual will tell you the recommended intervals for each type of fluid change/filter replacement/other maintenance. It is best if you go through the maintenance records and figure out when each item is next due based on the recommended schedule and then track it yourself.

If you can’t figure it out at all, you could take it to the dealer or reputable shop and tell them to inspect everything and do all the fluid changes at once. However, that can be like opening your wallet and telling them to help themselves and it may not be necessary for some items if they were already done recently.

The worst way to approach this in my experience is to let a less than reputable shop or a quick change oil place realize that you don’t know anything about cars and you don’t know when maintenance was last done. They will often start recommending many unnecessary and vastly overpriced service like cabin air filter changes that won’t do much, if anything, to help your car run better at all.

You should be looking at things like oil changes, transmission fluid changes (some vehicles have sealed transmissions so this isn’t needed), tire rotations, tire tread wear inspections, front end alignment, brake pad inspections and engine filter inspections for some common items that need to be maintained around the mileage you are at now.

I am sure you can find the maintenance schedule on the internet even if you don’t have the manual but you need to figure out a way to get a rough baseline of when things were last done and then track it yourself from now on.

9

I tend to buy older cars (100k miles or so on them) and drive them to about 250k or more before I get rid of them.

I personally am not anal about things like oil changes and such. As long as the engine has roughly the right amount of oil in it, it’s going to be fine. I actually end up going a bit more between oil changes than the manufacturers recommend and I’ve never had a problem because of it. To prove the point, I even stopped doing oil changes on an old pickup truck I used to have (it was starting to rust apart and I wanted an excuse to get rid of it). It ran for 60,000 miles and 5 years without an oil change, never leaked a drop of oil and I only finally junked it because of body rust (which I could have fixed but by that time I was just really tired of the old thing and wanted to get rid of it). It never had an engine problem at all. Of course, I’m not recommending that you do the same, I’m just pointing out that oil changes aren’t as important as most folks say they are. Stick to the maintenance schedules in the owner’s manual and you’ll be fine. Don’t let the oil change places talk you into shorter intervals between oil changes like it is somehow better for your car. It’s better for their profits. It doesn’t really do much for your car.

While you don’t need to be anal about regular maintenance, you do need to be anal about any other mechanical issues that come up. For example, if the CV boots get cracked (common as they age) this isn’t something that you want to skimp on and forget about. Do it sooner rather than later, since if dirt gets into the CV joints it will cause them to wear out fairly quickly. Also, something like a radiator leak will cause the car to overheat and can cause major damage to it, so you want to get something like that fixed ASAP as well.

And do be anal about keeping the tires properly inflated. Rotating tires helps distribute the wear, as was already mentioned. Keep up with front end alignments. If you notice the car starting to shake or shimmy, get it aligned soon. A car that is out of alignment will wear out tires quickly.

The biggest thing by far though is to drive the car gently. Jackrabbit starts and hard accelerations will wear out a car very quickly. Try to keep the engine RPMs down low. A car that is driven hard isn’t worth much after 100k miles. The same car driven gently can easily get you past 250k. I usually end up getting rid of cars because they are rusting apart rather than because of some mechanical issue. All the regular maintenance in the world can’t prevent the damage caused by hard driving.

Put in exactly the octane that the owner’s manual recommends. Octane doesn’t equal quality. Octane is a rating of how much you can compress the gasoline before it spontaneously explodes. If you put in too low of an octane, the gas can explode before it reaches the proper point during the engine cycle when the spark is supposed to explode it. This is very bad for your engine. Putting in higher octane than recommended just wastes money using gas that won’t explode at compressions your engine doesn’t reach anyway. You won’t get better gas mileage. In fact, on some cars, you can get worse mileage with too high of an octane since many higher octane fuels burn a bit slower and this throws off the timing in the engine a bit. Modern cars have knock sensors which will prevent you from doing any damage to the engine if you use too low of an octane, but it still isn’t good for your engine. Use exactly the octane recommended in your owner’s manual. Do not use higher or lower.

Also, if your car is a daily commuter (as most are) try to fill up at exactly the same gas station every time. Have the fuel filter checked during regular maintenance. As long as the filter isn’t getting clogged, keep using that gas station. If you have problems with the fuel filter getting gunked up, switch to a different gas station until you find one that has clean gas and clean tanks.

Just my 2 cents.

10

Regarding the transmission: Your Murano has a CVT, not a traditional auto transmission. In my Nissan the CVT fluid is only sold by Nissan and using something else (or allowing a place like Jiffy Lube do so) will void the warranty (I’m not sure this matters as you’re not the original owner and I’m not sure if it transfers) and may mess up your CVT. Nissan mechanics have a special tool to test the fluid and determine how much life is left, but at least in my vehicle, the recommended change interval is at 60,000 miles. If your SL is AWD you’ll also want to make sure the differencial fluid and transfer case fluid have been changed on schedule.

11

Fifty miles a day x five days a week = 13,000 miles a year.

If you had owned it from new and done this mileage, it would have done 13,000 x 8 = 104,000 miles just from your commuting. So the previous owner was doing a lot less mileage than you are.

66,000 miles is really not very much for a modern car. My car had 79,000 miles on the clock when I bought it two years ago, and it’s now just about to tick over to 100,000. No problemo.

12

There is good advice already given, espcially from e_c_g, so I won’t duplicate it. I did have to chuckle, though. I own 4 cars between my family members, and the newest among them is 2 years older than yours!

I firmly believe that occasional maintenance costs are far cheaper than a monthly payment!

13

Its a Nissan. You have nothing to worry about.

14

One thing I learned from buying a “certified” vehicle from the dealer: check to make sure you have a decent spare tire, and more important, a jack with all the parts.

15

Take care of it per the manual and it will clear 200K easily. You’ll own this car until long after you’re tired of it if you want to.

The key is to maintain it, and drive it, as if you *want *it to last that long. All the above about maintenance, plus no jackrabbit starts or hard stops, be as smooth as you can with your control inputs, drive defensively like they taught you in school, etc.