Road Test

Andy Stonehouse
January 16, 2008

After many years of living on the west side of the Continental Divide and Vail Pass — and only driving to Denver on a quarterly basis, like many people with hard-core valley-itis — I often wondered what it was all those Front Rangers were complaining about while doing the Weekend Warrior routine.

On Sunday, I broke the cardinal rule, a rule as important as “Apocalypse Now’s” mantra of “Never get off the boat” — I drove back to Denver, at 3 p.m. One of my sources had been watching the CDOT cameras on TV 45 minutes earlier and things looked OK, so I opted to get onto Interstate 70.

It was hell incarnate. Utterly terrifying. And it wasn’t even snowing.

People drove like mad savages on a last, go-for-broke cascade up to the tunnel and then, for the second time in a week, I came to a screeching halt in uphill traffic and sat there, perplexed. Loveland Basin to Silver Plume took an hour. I might have been better off driving back through Buena Vista or … hell, up through Walden and across Highway 14 to Fort Collins. If I’d had an in-car DVD player I could have watched an entire season of “Weeds” before I got to Idaho Springs.

The only thing that made the wretched, regrettable journey even remotely tolerable was the fact that I got to drive the 2008 Nissan Altima Coupe, and not a Kia Reno or a Chevy Aveo. The two-door Altima lacked any onboard video resources (or, as much as I might have appreciated them, a full fold-out couch, cocktail service or a roof-mounted Bushmaster 25 mm chain gun) … but was a comfortable spot to do the Clear County Crawl.

Having gone through some extensive subsequent psychotherapy (“happy thoughts … happy thoughts … happy thoughts”), I will tell you instead about the earlier ride to the High Country in the car, which was wonderfully pleasant. The Altima Coupe was introduced last May as a shorter, lower, sportier rendition of the venerable Altima sedan, and as such, it is indeed a different experience than the popular four-door (itself the fourth generation of the Tennessee-assembled Altima line).

Weighing in at about 3,300 pounds, seven inches shorter and two and a half inches lower than the sedan, the coupe is not quite in the chuckable, true sports car territory, but it’s getting there. With more curves and angles than a Stealth fighter, the Altima is a good-looking car; the only real complaints are some access and interior visibility issues.

Power is provided by a 24-valve DOHC V6 producing 270 horsepower, a gutsy setup that returns a decent 27 mpg on the highway (closer to 31, actually, in my 25 mph crawl mode).

Nissan’s even managed to improve what is normally one of my least favorite vehicular innovations, the continuously variable transmission. The Altima’s Xtronic CVT more smoothly harnesses speed transitions and is really only noticeable with a slight lag during high-speed takeoffs; a new innovation is a self-adjustable virtual six-speed mode, which replicates gears and is quite useful for incremental downhill de-acceleration.

The leather-covered steering wheel is big but the steering feel is light and smooth and I’m sure summer romps would be pleasantly amusing. Sporty, cloth-covered seating was also comfortably supportive — my test car was so long in the tooth that the driver’s seat was a little loose on its supports — and the only loser in the equation would be those who’d have to spend much time in the comfortable but leg room-impaired back seats.

The rear seats also split 60/40 so you can throw in a pair of skis or a snowboard, but trunk space is otherwise shallow and only holds 7.4 cubic feet of goodies.
With large B-pillars and small porthole-styled windows as part of the design (and that lower roof), left hand-side visibility for the driver can be a bit tricky. Tall doors and relatively small windows also had me straining a bit to see curbs while parking, without adjusting the side mirrors or jacking my seat up so much that I banged my head on the roof.

Nissan’s intelligent key system finally made sense to me five minutes before I gave the car back this week. My first attempts to keylessly unlock the Altima were confusing at best, with plenty of beeping and a trunk that wouldn’t remotely open when frozen.

Over the course of the week I mastered things and enjoyed the keyless pushbutton start, but was, as I find with many new vehicles, left with the question of what to do with the damned key. Turns out there’s a little docking bay to the lower left of the wheel which probably recharges the key’s battery — and I also found the missing trunk unlocking switch, which I had become convinced that the car did not actually have.

The coupe’s looks could, in fact, uncharitably be described as making it appear like a larger Pontiac G6 (or, especially from the rear, a slightly overstated Volvo S60), but there’s more than that. The pointy nose, horizontal headlamps, uncontoured body lines and such all cascade into that polycontoured rear, complete with gigantic brake lights, air diffuser lines on the lower bumper and aluminum exhaust ports — plus very nice 17-inch, open-spoke aluminum wheels.

Interior finishings are also a complex swirl of angles and surfaces but the instruments are easy to see and use (including a good trip computer) and the base stereo and manual air system did the trick.

What have I learned? New CVT good, two doors not so bad, I-70 not worth the bother until at least 11 p.m. Simple as that.