2020 Sentra for my wife, somebody talk me out of the CVT worry

the 2020 sentra is a different car than the one before it and the transmission is a different unit with a wider ratio spread, so the 2013 to 2018 altima horror stories are not automatically your horror stories. that is not the same as a promise.

what kills them is heat and old fluid, in that order, and the two are the same problem. the belt and the pulleys live in that fluid and the fluid shears down over time. towing, mountain passes, stop and go in august, all of it is heat. if you buy that sentra, change the fluid now no matter what the book says, then every 30,000. figure 180 to 220 at an independent who uses the right fluid, and do not let anyone flush it with a machine and universal fluid.

what still has a torque converter at your money: the mazda3 with the 2.5, it kept a conventional six speed, and the mazda6 before they quit making it. a corolla is a cvt but a different animal, toyota put a physical first gear in it so the belt is not taking the load off the line, which is the part that beats a belt up. elantra's ivt is a cvt with a chain instead of a belt. honda's is a cvt and it is a good one if the fluid is done.

put another way, on your budget you are either buying a cvt with records or a mazda. that is the whole decision.

i am the 3,450 you keep reading about, so let me take the other side of my own thread.

that transmission gave me 171,000 miles, 130,000 of them mine, before it did anything wrong. a timing belt job on a car from 1998 was 900 and nobody called those cars disposable. the cvt is not fragile, it is expensive when it goes and it goes without much warning, and those are different complaints than unreliable.

i would buy that sentra. i would take 400 off the asking price for the fluid change you are going to do in the first week and tell the lot exactly why.

2016 sentra sv, 141,000, original transmission, fluid at 30, 60, 90 and 120. phoenix. i drive 30,000 a year and most of it is empty freeway at two in the morning, which is the easiest kind of mile there is, so take that into account.

the thing nobody tells you about the sentra is that it is a slow car and that is fine. if you drive it like it is slow it never gets hot and nothing complains. my coworker rents one once a month and floors it everywhere and says they are junk.

before you decide on a feeling, go pull the numbers. the complaints database at nhtsa.gov lets you filter by year, make and component. the powertrain complaint count for the 2013 to 2016 altima is a wall you can see from across the room. for the 2020 and 2021 sentra it is not. that is not proof, people complain about new cars less because they are still under warranty, but it is better than the top ten results on google.

the other number nobody runs. the mazda is 1,500 more and at your wife's mileage it will use about 60 more gallons a year than the sentra. at 4 dollars that is 240 a year, so the mazda has to last three years longer than the sentra to break even on fuel alone, and that is before you add the transmission you are afraid of. buy the one she likes, the math is closer than the forum arguments make it sound.

from the salt belt this whole thread reads like a luxury problem. up here you buy on body and brake lines and hope the drivetrain is along for the ride. i have never once replaced a transmission. i have replaced two cars that had perfectly good ones in them.

if you are in spokane you probably get some of this. look under the back of both cars with a flashlight before you decide anything, a coeur d'alene car has seen magnesium chloride on the i-90 passes.