NHTSA Complaint #11623697 — 2015 NISSAN SENTRA

This particular vehicle exhibits a very strong, almost dash rattling judder when moving from the 1st to 2nd gearing ratio. This is especially dangerous in traffic and intersections where the vehicle is known to be in 1st or 2nd gear ratio, as Nissan likes to ratio out their CVT in software through the TCM to produce what feels like shifting from gear-to-gear as in a normal automatic transaxle. What makes this situation extremely bad is that when entering an on-ramp to the interstate (I-20 for example) it will intermittently judder from 1st to 2nd and then no power. After the judder it takes another few seconds for the TCM to figure out what happened and engage maybe more valve body pressure? I'm not sure completely, but it's extremely unsafe to drive. The Altima/Rogue with the same transaxle and model year run was issued a TSB and subsequently a TCM update was issued to rectify the early shudder, but the Sentra did not receive that update. The TCM output data shows that when this shudder is happening that there is a loss in hydraulic pressure somewhere in the unit. As Nissan says you never are supposed to change the fluid, this creates a very serious issue not only with the transmission, but warranty as well. The safety risk to others is high on this one because this could cause major rear-end conditions and city driving collisions as the car is supposed to be accelerating but can't because the transaxle was slipping and not gaining speed with the rest of the vehicles as expected.