The Nissan Path

Hey guys,

So I started getting a weird issue that I wanted to run by everyone. Car is an 2008 V8 LE, 93500 miles. Has been running OK until a few days ago, when it began randomly stumbing at low speed(30-40mph). Various lights on the dash would light up, transmission felt like it was slipping(reduced power, revs shooting up but not accelerating). After letting go of the accelerator, it slowly recovered and ran fine afterwards. After shutting it off, I noticed that both the speedo and tach needles would go down past 0 and vibrate for a few seconds before resettling to 0. Started reading about random shut offs and found this ipdm/ecm relay issue - it seemed to afflict 05-07 models but figured my 08 was close enough so went and replaced the ECM relay - a whopping $3 part at my local Nissan dealer. Changed it out, ran fine until yesterday when the stumble came back. During this stumble, it was more prolonged(1-2 minutes), various lights on the dash were flickering and the 4wd light came on for a while(didnt even know that light was there). Pulled over, shut the car off, got the needles fluttering again and then restarted. Good as new. Is my next step replacing the IPDM itself? Or is there something else I can check? It sounds like the problem is electrical in nature - the transmission otherwise shifts fine and truck runs fine with no error codes stored, even after these episodes. Thanks!

Rokas

I doubt that it's the IPDM. I would first check the charging system voltage to make sure it's within the 13.2-15.5 volt range and also make sure that the battery cable connections are clean and tight. It wouldn't hurt to test the battery, as well.

If the battery and charging system seem okay, my suspicion would be a faulty crank position sensor or cam position sensor (there are two cam sensors). I would check for stored trouble codes to see if there is one or more codes that would point to one of those sensors, although, I have heard of drivability issues caused by failed cam and crank sensors that did not trigger codes. Many times, heat will cause failing sensors to "act up."

As far as the IPDM issues of the earlier models, it wasn't really the IPDM that was so much the issue but the ECM relay. Initially, Nissan claimed the relay was not serviceable and started replacing IPDM's when the relay caused the drivability issues until people started replacing them. It was when they caught on to that fact that they stopped replacing the IPDM's and started replacing just the relay. There are some relays that are built into the IPDM that can't be replaced separately.

I had this issue for a while before my crank position sensor failed. When it finally failed, it did throw the OBDII code for it, making it an easy diagnosis and fix. But prior to the final failure there were no codes at all.

Also, check the battery post connections.

Here is my post on the crank sensor:

http://www.thenissanpath.com/viewtopic. ... k+position