Suburban Dad: Nissan Quest
Way to go. As a Suburban Dad, I’m required by law (at least it seems that way) to own a minivan. I have lived by this law for nearly a dozen years, so I know minivans, yet Nissan’s Quest wowed my suburban family with its plentiful features, unusual styling (and seating) and brilliantly laid-out controls. I particularly liked the Quest’s nav system, which I found easy to use without any instruction. We did have one unfortunate incident when we entered the wrong address and couldn’t figure out how to get the system to stop directing us there, but we were able to muzzle it.
- Anyway, the Quest performed better than I expected it would, and that was largely because of some approaches I hadn’t seen before:
- The Quest has a very low threshold; when I get into my own minivan, it’s a big step up. Not so with the Quest. It’s very easy to get in and out, and there’s a lot of space between the front seats and the second row, which led to fewer fights between the kids because they didn’t have to climb over each other to get in.
- The well in the back of the van was very deep, and the two-step process to drop the third row was easy and intuitive. The seats didn’t lie completely flat, but their edge was well below the sill, so I don’t imagine loading the Quest would be a problem.
- The third row was stadium-seating style, which Teen Son liked. It improved his vision of the road, and he felt it was “spacious,” one of five words he had to say about the Quest.
- I found the nav/radio controls to be extremely easy to use, and I didn’t need to look away from the road very much to make changes.
- The integrated nav/radio display also impressed me. It has the clock display built into it, which I prefer over the many carmakers who think the clock should be nowhere near the radio display. In addition, it has one of those “when the car gets louder, we’ll turn up the radio” functions. Sadly, for me anyway, the van’s ride was so quiet I couldn’t really test how well this might work. I thought about asking the kids to scream, but then thought better of it.
The Kids: They had less to say about this one, but they were all happy with it. The series of moonroofs throughout the back wowed them, especially the Tweener Daughter, and they were particularly glad to see the personal headphone jacks in the back. We didn’t get to use it, but the kids took note of the built-in DVD player to complain again about how I’d neglected to buy one when we bought our current minivan.
All in all, we found the Quest bigger, more user-friendly and sleeker than we expected. It may not be new (the model was only tweaked slightly from the previous year), but Nissan has something here.
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I HAVE THE FIRST YEAR MODEL QUEST. THIS ONE LOOKS MORE SPORT ORIENTED THAN OTHER VANS IN THE SEGMENT. THE ONLY UPDATE FOR THE NEXT REFRESH WOULD BE A 60/40 SPLIT THIRD ROW BENCH TO INCREASE VERSATILITY AND PERHAPS (IF IT DOESN'T KILL LIKE OTHER AUTO'S) A CVT OR A MULTI-DISPLACEMENT ENGINE TO ENHANCE FUEL ECONOMY, INTELLIGENT KEY (W/PUSH START) AND FINALLY SECOND ROW ROLL UP/DOWN WINDOWS. ALL THAT AT A MUCH MORE CONSIDERABLE PRICE TAG. THIS ONE IS OVER THE TOP WHEN IT COMES TO THE TOTAL.
Evidently this guy set low expectations and in my opinion failed to meet them (he seems happy though). The quality on these vans is subpar at best. The Mississippi plant has not yet produced a quality vehicle as all vehicle lines are plagued with defects to include the quest, armada, infinity qx56, and some altimas (Tennessee makes the reliable Altimas). JDPower started showing this trend last year but it will be much worse this year.
For what this van sells for, the all-new Saturn Outlook, GMC Acadia, Buick Enclave, Ford Edge & Lincoln MKX provide much, much more quality, ride, value, features, mileage, power, style, handling and pizzaz compared to the poorly designed and even more poorly built Quest.
Wait until after 3/36,000 your car starts having problems, then you will see what a piece of junk this Nissan Quest is. Alot of parts you must get it only from the nissan dealers and they are double the price if you were to take it to the local mechanic. I bought my nissan Quest 2005 brand new, and after 3 and 1/2 years, with only 36,000 miles, my CD player broke. When I take it to the dealer they want to charge me $700 to fix it. They told me they need to send it to some company to fix the cd player. So I took my car to 4 local mechanics who also know about auto stereo systems, and all of them told me to take it back to the dealer due to the tremendous amount of work and complication involved. (one mechanic even said the way Nissan designed the quest is like as if they don't want anybody to work on the car except Nissan.)
My tires for a base model quest are special order and most tire store don't carry them. They are like $180 to $200 each tire.
The dealer told me I should buy extended warranty and pay $2200 to extend until the car is 7 years old or 100,000 miles.
Now I am worrying about what happen after the warranty expire. This car seems like very expensive to fix because of the way it was designed and the parts needed special order.
I wanted a car that is reliable and most parts are easily purchased and not you can only get it from the dealer. I should have stay with Toyota!!