Nissan Navara 2020

Nissan Navara 2020 Q&As

Check out real-world situations relating to the Nissan Navara here, particularly what our experts have to say about them.

• When the fuel light is on in the 2014 Nissan Navara, how many litres of fuel are left in the tank?

  The only thing more unreliable than a low-fuel warning light is the on-board computer that gives you a distance-to-empty kilometre figure. The problem with the latter is that the figure will differ enormously depending on your driving style at the time. For instance, the computer, a highway trip might, suggest you have 100km left in the tank. But once you hit the outer suburbs and switch to stop-start driving, that number could be as little as half the figure flashing on the dashboard.

  As a rule of thumb, car-makers tend to calibrate the fuel-warning light to come on somewhere between 100 and 50km before you actually run dry. But it’s still a stab in the dark, and really not worth pushing your luck.

  To get the most accurate feel for what the fuel-warning light is really telling you, here’s our advice: Fill the car to and absolute brim. A 2014 Navara holds either 75 or 80 litres of fuel, depending on specification. Then, the next time the fuel light flashes on, pull into the first service station and fill it to the brim again. That will give you a pretty accurate idea of the umber of litres you’ve used from filling up to the point where the light switches on. Then, you can subtract those litres from the tank’s capacity to arrive at how much was left in the tank.

   

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• What can I do if the steering wheel and gear knob are peeling in my 2018 Nissan Navara?

  This is a more common problem than you might imagine and applies to a lot of cars besides Nissan Navaras. It’s not always caused by people with constantly wet hands or those who work with chemicals, either; a lot of pampered vehicles have seen this type of problem.

  As well as being pretty ordinary to look at day after day, this sort of damage also devalues a car when you go to sell it. The warranty on your Navara would have been for the first three years (Nissan shifted to a five-year warranty mid-2019) but because it was a demonstrator, the warranty period would have started from the date it was first registered or reported as sold, not the day you bought it.

  Most new-car warranties also state that `normal wear and tear’ is not covered, but there’s an argument that normal wear and tear shouldn’t be visible on a steering wheel after just four years and 60,000km of use.

  If it really bothers you, there are motor trimmers who can stitch on a new leather covering which I would expect to last a lot longer than four years. You would, of course, have to remove the wheel from the car which requires somebody who knows their air-bag safety drills and procedures.

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• Does the wrong battery cause problems with the starter motor in the Nissan Navara 2013?

  Just as oils aint oils, batteries aint batteries. The correct battery for your car will not be based on brand, but rather its capacity and output (does it have enough grunt to turn your engine) as well as its physically layout (are, for instance, the negative and positive terminals on the correct ends of the battery for your battery terminals to connect properly).

  By `kick out’ I’ll assume you mean the starter motor doesn’t spin the car’s engine when you turn the key. There are lots of causes for this. The first is that you do, indeed, have the incorrect battery that doesn’t have enough cranking amperes to spin your engine and provide enough power to the vehicle’s ignition for the engine to fire. Or, you may simply have fitted a battery that’s low on charge for the same results. Buying a brand-new battery from a shop is no guarantee that the thing will be fully charged up. It’s always a good idea to charge any new battery overnight before trying to start a car with it, in case the battery has lost charge while sitting on the store’s shelf for weeks or months.

  Beyond that, there are still plenty of reasons for a car to refuse to turn over. I’d start with checking the earth connections from the battery to the car’s body and engine and then do a test on the battery to see if it’s in decent health or not. Most workshops can do this simple test for you if you’re in doubt.

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• What is the best reliable ute?

  Given the kilometres showing on the car in question, that price-tag is about right, rather than any kind of exceptional bargain. Beyond that, the D40 Navara is not generally regarded as a magnificent long-term prospect and many in the trade reckon about 160,000km is the limit for reliable service going forward. At least the one you’re looking at has a full service record, so that’s a start, but frankly, there are better options out there that represent greater value for money as well as longer shelf-life.

  The D40 in turbo-diesel form was susceptible to timing chain problems at about the 80,000km mark. Check the service record to see if a new chain was fitted around this mileage. Even if it has, mechanics reckon the chain needs to be inspected every 40,000km thereafter to prevent catastrophic failure when you least expect it. The D40 also suffered from injector problems, EGR coolers that could fail and ruin the engine, automatic transmission coolers that could destroy the gearbox and lots of other problems right through to cracks developing in the vehicle’s body. The fact that this is an ex-work truck won’t help those problems one little bit as it’s probably already had a pretty hard life, servicing notwithstanding. The broad advice for somebody looking for reliability first and foremost would be to cast your net wider.

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