ASD Dad

Welcome and be sure to post up tons of pictures! I used to be an installer back in the early 90's. Our shop built some IASCA winning cars but I was never that good. Our custom fab guys were artists with what they could do with fiberglass, leather, etc. Cant wait to see some installs.

Why on earth would somebody buy a "used" vehicle with 17k miles for a grand less than a brand new one? That is crazy. No wonder Chris in Charlotte doesnt want to keep used ones on the lot.

I got hit broadside but a girl who was texting vs. paying attention to the big red stop light. She hit me with a 2015 Honda Civic in the passenger door. About $6500 in damage but I drove away just fine and drove to the body shop. I had my 3 kids with me who were all napping when it happened. They barely knew we got hit! Definitely woke them up but it wasnt a major incident. The Honda had the entire front end smashed in. A local family owns a silver NV like mine and we have chatted a few times. Wife hit a large buck at 45 mph (van was a whole 3 weeks old!). They did over $10K in damage but overall they were just fine inside. With the large hood the bucks antlers never made it back to the windshield which at that speed in a smaller vehicle is a major concern. The only issue both of us had was parts availability. Nissan is selling so many they dont have extra parts right away. I had to wait over a month and they waited almost 2-1/2 months total.

HP and TQ wars are fun though! I remember when the Viper came out with it's monster V10. 400hp and 450tq. I thought wow, that is crazy and nobody will need more or see more than those numbers. That output is almost laughable these days for many vehicles! For a sports car forget it, those numbers are a base model. There are 6 cyl motors out there with those numbers now. Now you have 700hp Hellcats that can light up the back tires going down the highway. Overkill? Absolutely! But it is fun to watch.

Add a tuner and you insta-void your warranty in most cases on a diesel. On a gasser it is harder to mess things up with a tuner. I would need to be an outright idiot, max my timing, and run bad gas while towing through the Rockies at full throttle to get my Bully Dog to do any damage. Even then the ECU may still override things if you abuse it that bad. You start messing with boost and other settings on a diesel and you get giant gains but can also pop the engine if you are just doing it without much thought behind it. I have friends that have run modded diesels for 100K miles with zero issues but they are also careful and stay on top of things. Others go nuts and wonder why they have a cracked piston! Look, I agree the new 5.0 Cummins is a decent motor and the monsters in the new domestics are/could be overkill. I just feel like the 5.0 is slotted weird along with the Titan itself. It's not quite HD enough to do that job but it is too heavy and not efficient enough to be a 1/2T winner. It also isnt cheap with options. If you refuse to drive domestic then it is the only choice for certain needs. I havent driven a domestic in over a decade. BUT - if I needed a new pickup that could haul what the Titan does I am not convinced I would be looking at it first vs. a domestic. Back to the OP, I think it will be pretty hard to find a TH with a garage big enough for a 4 seat RZR that is light enough for the NV to haul it through the mountains or even the flats once that TH is fully loaded with the RZR, gas, accessories, etc. You dont just haul an empty RZR! Doesnt matter if you toss that all in the NV either, I think the 16,000 combined would be reached quickly.

The Titan Cummins 5.0 V8 is rumored to be coming but it's nowhere near what a true towing diesel should be - the 6cyl Cummins, Duramax or Power Stroke - in the HD trucks of the domestics.

It is going to be VERY hard to not go over payload and combined weight rating on a NV towing a TH that can also haul a 1500 lb 4 seat RZR in the garage. Combined is around 16,000 lbs all in. Tow specs are currently around 8900 lbs. Hauling that much weight and in those mountains? Keep the F350!

Preliminary reports are that it will be an 8% increase in mileage over the current model. is 8% worth waiting for? Do you trust new tech for both the motor and transmission? Neither have been out longer than a few months in the Titan and upcoming Armada. The current motor and transmission have been out for many many years with few hiccups. Since there is not any pricing data on the new model we dont know what increase there will be. You wont know how long 8% better will take to get your money back. Nobody knows if it will tow better. It should tow much better if it all works smoothly, a lot more HP and TQ (although Nissan detuned the motor for the NV which still makes me mad) with 2 more gears so the first 4 or 5 can be spaced better for towing with two overdrives when not towing. I have 30,000 miles on my 2015 and a lot of those are towing our Toyhauler. It weighs in around 7700# loaded up and we have 3 kids and two 85# dogs that are in the van. I've towed through the Blue RIdge mountains with no issues. MPG when towing is going to be terrible as with any gas motor - figure 8-9mpg if you have some weight on the back. You'll use 4th and even 3rd gear a lot when going up hills but all gas motors do that, you have to get into the meat of the torque curve to haul weight. I see you have a F350. Not sure what motor you have but if it is the diesel you will be sorely disappointed in how the NV tows in comparison. There just isnt any way to compare a 1T diesel truck to the NV. You also have a lot more payload capacity. If you have a F350 gas then it will be a lot more similar. You also live out West in the big mountains, you'll need to wait for others to chime in who have towed at those elevations with this gas motor. Again, if you have a diesel it will be even worse in trying to compare vs. a gas motor up there! Forget an apples and oranges comparison we're talking a watermelon vs. a grape at that point.

Welcome to the site! Thanks for your service first off. That is quite the swap you have planned in the future! That 12V, 6 spd combo should be great in this van. Should be plenty of room under the hood and sounds like you have done this before so good luck with the mod. Finding a nice 12V 15 years from now could be interesting though!

Welcome to the forum and I hope the ordering process goes smoothly with the delivery. There is a commercial manager on here (Chris) who thought his first new 2017 could arrive as early as mid-late January I think. Hopefully you get yours quicker than you think. Let us know how it all goes.

Welcome to the family! Nice looking NV there, we love our silver. We had actually shopped for a used Excursion before buying our NV but the nice examples cost near the same as the NV! They were either run into the ground, nice but with a ton of miles or modded/lifted/etc. Love the NV and couldnt be happier with the decision.

Welcome to the forum! You're somewhat close to me, we almost drove to ATL to get our van but got a local dealer to match the price. Lots of good info on here if you do want to do any mods to the van!

Wollip is correct. The console 12v outlet is live regardless of key position. Great for charging items all the time but bad if you forget to unplug for long term drain!

Donuts in our big vans could be fun and scary with it being so large! I love all the tech in new cars and really do like my NV quite a bit. Some of the items are just getting overboard. What I miss is being able to easily work on new cars. I could swap out the entire suspension on a VW GTi in under an hour. Cam swap? No problem. Injectors, timing, any of that stuff was easy. You could work on half of my old cars with just a 10mm socket! My old Jeep Cherokee winter beater was the same way. Had a bad injector and it was a quick fix after a run to Autozone. My old neighbor had a Z/28 Camaro. Not the newest body style but right before they switched. He wanted to install new brakes on it himself so I volunteered to help. Well the install was no problem, had it done in about an hour or so for the fronts. The problem was when it came time to bleed the brakes so we could put in fresh fluid. We couldnt bleed them manually! You had to hook up a Chevy Dealer only computer (Tech 1) to the ABS system to get it to cycle correctly. Without that it wouldnt work. You could bleed the brakes but it would feel mushy afterwards. He had to take it to the dealer just to bleed the fluid out!

When you press it an icon will light up on your dash with little squiggly lines. It is also covered in the owners manual. It is pouring rain here today so I may try it later on and see just how much wheel spin it lets you have! The two times I got stuck in wet clay with the old Firestones I know I turned it off then but I honestly cant remember if it just let me keep spinning away. I think it did...

Are you turning off Traction Control using the little switch to the lower left of the steering wheel? If that is on the ECU will never allow wheel spin, that is what it is made to do. They are not concerned about the guy towing or in dirt/snow they are concerned about the person on wet roads going around a corner or hammering it from a stop. A lot of people these days have no idea about throttle modulation, they are too used to electronic nannies like Traction Control, ABS and now they have Lane Assist, Emergency Braking, and all sort of other nannies on cars! Some vehicles will still resist excessive wheel spin even with the switch turned off but that is the first start for trying it out. On my Tundra there was a sequence you had to follow if you wanted to 100% disable the TC. A pain, but it would completely turn off.

I was pleasantly surprised with my Hankook AT-M's in slushy snow. Andy is right that without siping they wont work well on ice but those should do great in slush or hardpack snow.

I was hopeful for more than 8% in savings for MPG. That can pay out over the long run but a very long run! We just have a very large, very boxy, very heavy vehicle. Not sure much of anything will really help MPG other than a small diesel and then it wont tow anything and be slow. The Cummins V8 is sort of like a weird mix between the stump pulling power of the inline 6 Cummins used in Rams vs. an Ecodiesel style motor. My neighbor is a contractor with a new top of the line Ram 3500 Megacab 4x4 diesel. Babying it he can get 19mpg out of that tank of a truck. He has seen as high as the low 20's at 60mph with the cruise on. Towing his Bobcat around he can still manage 14 on the flats. I would trade up in an instant if they could pull those numbers out of the NV. If he really hammers on it (75+ mph) he still gets around 15. Since adding my all terrain tires and roof rack I am lucky to crack 13 mpg and most tanks are 12-12.5 mpg. That is with a mix of mostly highway style driving too.

Here is a photo of my fuse cover for a 2015 NV SL. Take note of the Up Arrow for orientation.

Nissan was heavily marketing the Titan to construction and the farm trade industry. The XD even has gooseneck hookups which is all farm/construction usage. I guess I can hold out hope that somebody like Bullydog can unlock the full HP/TQ of the motor but still doesnt make me happy they gimped it on purpose.

Weird, why is the motor rated lower in the NV vs. the Titan? Motor is identical. Titan is 390 hp / 394 tq. There is more than enough room in the engine bay and below for the same intake and exhaust manifolds along with actual exhaust. If Nissan tuned the NV lower I wonder what their reasoning would be. Disappointing to be sure.

Ditto all the above. We looked used briefly but wanted the full 5/100K warranty and the prices used were close enough to new it made zero sense to buy used. The NV is the only vehicle out there right now that can carry a lot of people and tow a decent sized trailer. The 3/4 Ton Suburbans are no longer sold unless you are a government agency. Expedition is sort of OK in the XL length. Transit and Sprinter cant tow much. The other big Ford E series and Chevy's big vans are ancient technology and feel it. The new 2017 Armada can tow 8500+ pounds and has the new Titan motor and transmission in it but the new Patrol platform is shorter so you lose 3rd row room and storage behind that row. Plus they are expensive! NV is pretty much it if you have a lot of people or stuff and also want to tow something bigger than a Pop-Up camper. We have 3 boys - 9, 7, 4 and two 85 pound dogs. We pull a big toyhauler camper and love the setup.

Well my fun tow was quite boring. Towed their nice, brand new Trail Manor back through the mountains of VA and WV and the NV never broke a sweat. Camper weighs in around 4000 lbs so I didnt even us a WD hitch. Hooked it up to a standard tow shank, lowered my headlights a bit since I would be driving well into the night and took off South. Mileage on the flats was 10 mpg at 65 mph. In the mountains it was 8-9 mpg at the same speeds. I could easily use cruise on the flats and even some rolling hills if I shifted manually. I had to use 3rd gear quite a bit on the long climbs and left it in 4th for the way back down to save the brakes. Mileage was about the same as hauling my giant brick of a camper vs. their low slung TM. Doesnt seem to matter what you are hauling, once you add a load the mileage drops period. Zero drama though and it never felt like it was having issues. Zero sway even in the higher crosswinds too which was nice. One added bonus. Found out the NV does better than I thought it would in slushy snow. Not sure how the stock Firestone highway tires would be (pretty sure a lot worse) but my all terrain tires had zero issues. We had some snow up in OH and it drove in the slush nicer than my old 2WD Tundra did with Michelin M/S 2's on it. The Tundra had traction but it was much squirrelier.

Update - they had my van all day to fix my dash from the botched radio replacement the last time. They found out the clips were broken on one piece so need to order yet another part. Sigh... I did get a brand new radio (my 3rd). Seat was looked at and photos were taken. They sent the photos off to the Regional Rep and are awaiting the next steps. Service manager said most likely I will be getting another driver seat (also my 3rd!). He hasnt seen that happen in other NV's and there are several NVP 3500 SL's being used as shuttles around town. I may get some seat covers for the new seat. Save wear and tear and wont need to worry as much when camping or at the beach.

Pete - thanks for all the info from Quigley! That is all very helpful news. I'd still love a factory Nissan 4x4 option in the future but I am guessing the market is too small to justify the costs when places like Quigley have a full blessing from Nissan. Does anyone know if Advanced 4x4 has a Nissan blessing? I am guessing no since they have a 2 speed transfer case option.