NHTSA Complaint #11427547 — 2012 NISSAN SENTRA

I was going on a road trip with my sister that should have taken 5 hours and I had enough gas to make it there with no stops. I had gotten an emissions test done a few days prior for registration purposes and the car passed (there were no engine lights present). When we started the drive between Nevada and Arizona, there were many steep inclines and downhill areas. The first few inclines were fine, but about an hour into the trip we were going up a hill and I could not get the car to accelerate past 45mph with the pedal fully to the floor. At first I suspected that I may have made poor use of my momentum, but after cross-checking my RPM gauge, I noticed that the car was not making effort to go over 3000 RPM's. I was very fearful being that the car was barely able to hold 45mph in the 65mph zone and we may not be able to make it over the hill. After suffering through many steep inclines in the middle of nowhere, I was finally able to pull over and turn the car completely off. There were no mechanics within an hour drive in either direction, so I chose to continue. I got back on the highway and the car was behaving normally again. I thought the whole thing was a hoax until it happened again on another bout of uphill stretches. We were trying to find another town to pull over in and hit a thunderstorm at one point. It was absolutely terrifying because we were practically crawling up the hills and unable to hold a constant speed, but it was not safe to pull over because of the weather. We eventually made it through and were able to turn the car off. The problem went away again for a short time and came back a final time on a flat stretch of road. I was unable to accelerate over 70mph. The only problem that I've ever had with the car was that the transmission wasn't changing gears smoothly, and it caused an engine light at one point. I got the engine light checked and it was for the transmission, but the engine light went away soon after and has not come back.