2005 Nissan Xterra

[RawrImAMonster]

Well I decided to go ahead and pick up a new daily since I'm going to be selling the BMW before too long. I found this thing in Fredericksburg. It has only had 1 owner in 130k miles and overall looks to be in really good shape for the mileage and age.

It's a 2005 Nissan Xterra SE w/ 4wd. Surprisingly not all of these have 4wd. Not really sure why you'd want one without, but I guess some people don't care.

The SE package is the top of the line one for this year so it comes with all the creature comforts like a rockford fosgate stereo system. It actually sounds pretty good. Maybe not quite as good as the harmaan kardon system in my 135i, but it's also not much worse. The factory subwoofer has a pretty good punch actually, but I may end up throwing in my spare basslink sub at some point.

Right now, the immediate plans for it include a good brake bleed and doing something about the factory trans cooler. The brakes are miserably soft compared to my 135i, but I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be this soft. The trans coolers on these cars tend to develop a leak over time and end up mixing the trans fluid and antifreeze. This kills the transmission. The cheap method of fixing this is bypassing the trans cooler altogether, and it wouldn't be a problem for most people. The trans really only makes a lot of heat when you're in offroad situations based on what I've been reading. The proper way to do it is to replace the whole radiator/trans cooler with an aftermarket one or to just get a small add-on trans cooler to compensate for losing the factory one. I'll probably go with the add-on trans cooler at some point. For now, I will bypass the factory one just so I don't ruin my trans.

Otherwise I probably won't do a whole lot to this mod-wise. I'm going to throw an in-dash navigation unit in since I'm going to be moving to a city I'm not super familiar with here in a few months. The factory radio is already double din so this will be super easy.