Yesterday, I teamed up with our excellent videographer, Griffin, to drive The Autopian‘s Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet some 3,400 miles to take part in a Lemons Rally in Texas. Somehow, our trip became a disaster before I even left Illinois, and then, things somehow got dumber once I got to sunny California. The Murano CrossCabriolet managed to break me after only 200 feet of driving. As a cruel twist, I think the CrossCab itself might also be broken now, too. This is Day 1 of the CrossCab CrossCountry CabCross CountryCab.
If you’re new to The Autopian‘s Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet antics, I’ll bring you up to speed. David Tracy, Jason Torchinsky, and Matt Hardigree came up with a bizarre plan to buy a somewhat cheap version of Nissan’s abysmal failure of a convertible crossover, the Murano CrossCabriolet. They then partnered up with our friends at XPEL to apply paint protection film to half of it. Our friends at Vredestein also dressed up the Murano’s Ford Mustang Tri-Bar wheels in chunky off-road tires. We’ve put the 103,000-mile Autopian CrossCab through a lot of abuse from failed cop slides, more than one keying, and dates with wayward shopping carts.
Yet, the hardest test for the CrossCab, I think, wasn’t going to be shopping carts or Jason in cop cosplay, but a grueling 3,400-mile road trip. Griffin and I will be attending the Texas Lone Star Lemons Rally this weekend, and the car needs to get from Los Angeles to be there. So, I was pinched as the driver for this epic road trip.
Now, a trip like this wouldn’t be a big deal for any well-maintained car. However, the Autopian CrossCab has a convertible top that has a mind of its own. Also, we can’t discount the lift kit and huge tires. The Autopian team and the team at Galpin aren’t entirely sure how the CVT or the rest of it will like darting across the country with its big wheels. That’s even before we get to our plans to take it off-road today.
Griffin and I completed our first 500 miles of our journey yesterday, and the trip was a disaster before it even started.
Chicago Beats Me
We planned to run this trip on a razor-thin budget. David booked me the cheapest flight he could find on Frontier Airlines. In theory, this was going to be perfect. I left home on Monday morning early enough that I would have gotten to the airport with two hours to spare. Unfortunately, I did not consider two factors. The first was that Chicagoland got its biggest single snowstorm in a decade during the weekend. Folks returning to work on Monday found themselves spinning out and crashing. We found ourselves stuck in traffic behind at least three crashes, which gobbled up about an hour of time.
The second issue was that so many flights were canceled during the snow event that basically everyone who wanted to leave Illinois right after Thanksgiving was now leaving that Monday morning. The days before and after Thanksgiving are already some of the busiest travel days in the year, and now it was made even worse. As such, I got stuck in epic traffic only three miles from the airport. Traffic moved so slowly that I could have walked those three miles faster. Alas, we were on an expressway, and that was an unsafe bet. It took another hour to get to O’Hare’s terminals.
Sadly, this series of unfortunate events ate my buffer, and I missed a flight for only the second time in my life. Another hit came from the fact that Frontier’s schedule out of both of Chicago’s international airports sucks. There were no more open Frontier flights headed to Los Angeles until Thursday, so rebooking wasn’t an option. I ended up spending $410 on a ticket at United Airlines. Admittedly, we probably should have just booked United to begin with. It wasn’t even much more expensive.
Amusingly, my bad luck continued when I boarded the plane, because the flight crew had an issue getting the cabin door to close properly. Thankfully, the maintenance crew eventually figured it out. On the plus side, the United jet was a slick Boeing 757! I love these lengthy hot rods.
What A Beast
Once I finally got to Los Angeles, I saw the CrossCab for the first time, and it was love at first sight. I love how the wheels contrast with the paint. I love how the lift kit and chunky tires make the CrossCab look mean. I love that this stupid car exists in the first place.
Now, the Autopian guys were a funny bunch and didn’t tell me much about the CrossCab’s condition, leaving me to figure things out on my own. I knew the roof had maybe only a couple of closes left in it, but nothing else. Well, the first thing I learned is that the CrossCab’s key fob didn’t work. The guys never bothered to troubleshoot this, so it could just be a dead battery.
The second problem was that the car’s battery was dead. Thankfully, we had a jump pack for that.
Then, I had to learn the car’s issues in a rapid-fire manner. The ominous red roof light of death was on constantly. I thought this was because the roof was slightly open, so I hit the close button on the roof. The windows automatically dropped, and then I heard a sad mechanical sound behind me, but the light did not turn off. Jason told me that the light is always on. Ah, okay.
The CrossCab Beats Me
Next, I walked around the car, drinking in its features. I thought the trunk was bizarre. When the roof opens, it occupies half of the trunk. Nissan decided to partition off half of the trunk with a movable cargo divider. The part that bugs me is that this is a somewhat large crossover, yet there’s only enough trunk space for a single bag. That ticked me off enough that I tried to outsmart the CrossCab by retracting the cargo blind and then slamming the trunk shut.
Once Griffin got his camera gear, we loaded up and took off. It took only 200 feet for the CrossCab to break me.
We were just barely out of the Galpin parking lot when the roof system’s alarm went off. This alarm was incessant and blared every time we were over a few mph. I pulled over and hit the roof close button. But this time, nothing happened but two angry beeps. I then hit the roof open button. Again, I got two pissed off beeps.
Admittedly, I didn’t read the manual, so I didn’t know what the beeps were about. I assumed that the car thought the roof was open, and that’s why it whined above a few mph. But why couldn’t I close the roof? It took me about ten minutes, but then I remembered the label I read when I opened the trunk. The roof will not operate if the cargo blind is not in place. Okay, that’s an easy fix! All I have to do is pop the trunk, place the blind, and then hit the roof close button until the noise goes away.
Ah yeah, but there was one tiny issue. Apparently, the CrossCab locks the trunk when it thinks the roof is open. I did not read James Gilboy’s piece on why the CrossCab’s roof was riddled with flaws. But he included this line:
Because the computer thinks the top is moving, it thinks the roof’s cover is open, and therefore in the path of the trunk lid. That disables the trunk’s electronic latch release, meaning the CrossCab’s trunk—along with the potentially offending cargo divider sensor—become inaccessible through normal means. They aren’t fully sealed off, but opening the trunk from here requires a method most CrossCab owners have never had to employ up to this point: A hidden physical key.
Since I didn’t read Gilboy’s piece, I did not know about the hidden keyhole in the trunk lid. It took me 10 minutes to find the hole. The whole ordeal took us about 20 minutes, and it almost broke me. I began picturing myself driving 3,400 miles with the beeper going off the whole way. I wondered if it was going to be wise to do this trip.
Thankfully, I was able to place the cargo blind, return the operation to the top, and spammed the roof close button enough times that the car shut up. But wow, there was a whole 20 minutes there where the roof system seemed to be soft-locked.
It’s So Thirsty
Once we finally got on the road, I got to learn the beautiful parts and the ugly parts about our CrossCab. On the one hand, it has a V6. On the other hand, between the CVT and the big tires, that V6 didn’t feel particularly potent. Other ugly parts included the interior noise, of which there is plenty, and the fuel economy, which is abysmal, at only 17 mpg.
Yet, at the same time, I found myself in love. I adored the pillarless doors and windows. I loved the comfortable seats. The Bose sound system, while not in my top 10 favorite sound systems, was still pretty good. Our modifications also hadn’t completely ruined the ride, either. Our CrossCab is a little bouncy, but overall, a good way to eat up 500 miles.
Once we finally got moving, it took us roughly eight hours to get from Los Angeles to Flagstaff, Arizona. That timing, to me, was honestly wild. As a lifelong resident of the Midwest, I had always pictured cities like Flagstaff and Phoenix being a day’s drive from Los Angeles, not mere hours.
Those eight hours gave me plenty of time to get acquainted with my steed for the next week. One of its quirks, at least to my ears, is that there’s some sort of faint rotational noise coming from the front wheels. When we were in Los Angeles, I chalked this up to the off-road tires.
What’s That Noise?
However, this noise became louder 500 miles later here in Arizona. The part that concerned me, specifically, was that the noise became quieter on right turns and louder on left turns. That’s the call of a bad right front wheel bearing. I asked David about the wheel noise, and he told me that the tires are quiet. So, there’s probably something unhappy in the front end. But there’s a twist, as Griffin says he does not hear any wheel noise. Wow, okay. Either there’s something broken, or I’m hearing things.
As of now, the wheels seem tight, so if a wheel bearing is dying, it’s probably in its very early stages. Either way, we didn’t bring the tools for such a repair job, so we’re playing it by ear for now.
Our plan for today is to have some fun going off-road. Apparently, we will not be wheeling in Flagstaff, but in Sedona. Some of you did email me, so I will attempt to coordinate a meet-up if we can figure that out. Our other goal is to drop the roof for the one and only time during this trip. We want to get footage of the CrossCab getting dirty with the top down! Hopefully, it’ll come back up, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get there.
But for now, I’m happy that we successfully got the first 500 miles down. It feels like the CrossCab broke me a little with its roof shenanigans. Then, maybe our chunky wheels took out a bearing, who knows. Either way, we have 2,900 miles to go!
Top graphic image: Griffin Riley
This is how I know I’ve gotten soft in my old age. As a kid, our family’s vacations were always road trips with 12-16 hour nonstop drives, which I handled with aplomb. These days, I’m ready to stop driving after 8 hours. Younger me would be so disappointed.
You think you’re old.
I’m ready to stop after 4 hours.
Which is perfect since that’s how long it takes to get to Paso Robles from LA on the drive to San Francisco.
Pinot Noir, anyone?
Seems like you’ve got the timing nailed down. That probably came with old age as well.
As someone who grew up with family roadtrip vacations starting in the midwest, and always including at least one 12-hour day, I like love your differentiation between LA-Flagstaff being “roughly 8 hours” and “mere hours” and not something long like “a day’s drive.”
I love a long day in the car but understand that I am in a very small minority especially on the east coast and with my extended family where anything over about 5 hours isn’t mere hours or even a day’s drive – it is a flight.
“I thought the trunk was bizarre. When the roof opens, it occupies half of the trunk. Nissan decided to partition off half of the trunk with a movable cargo divider.”
This is just about every convertible built in the 90s/2000s – unless it’s a hardtop convertible which takes up 3/4 the trunk space.
Also, never let David book your flights.
And take the “L” to O’Hare.
https://www.transitchicago.com/blueline/
Hahahahahahahahaha, I’m helping out with judging this Lemons Rally. Send thoughts and prayers to Jeff, specifically.
Something tells me I rented the more comfortable crossover. It’s Cayenne time, babyyyyyyy.
Adding to the eatery recs in AZ: Merkin Vineyards (from another Lemons Rally, no less!) in Cottonwood was very good, had great food, and was a lot of fun because, well, Maynard Wine. Maynard, from Tool, makes wine.
That’s all I’ve got, but if you make it to the Lemons Rally, I gotta say: if I find green spaghetti on a menu, I’m ordering it. One of my favorite pastas and it’s a south Texas thing.
The only problem I see is that you have an extremely naked front license plate bracket on that thing just below the awesome THE AUTOPIAN sticker which means…
Youz guys need a “The Autopian” license plate, pronto!
My wife an I previously owned an ’11 Quest and a ’17 Quest, both with pretty much the same exact powertrain, VQ35 etc. as the MCC and the very best mpg on the highway we could manage was with the ’17 at 24 mpg average and that is driving in the South Carolina Lowcountry where it is sea-level flat. They were gas hogs for sure but they were pretty heavy.
Driving now is refreshing with an average of 34-36 mpg in both of our Outlanders with the PR25DD non-turbo & non-hybrid engine but we do sometimes miss the extra room but still have the 3rd row convenience.
The more I learn about the Cross Cab the stupider it seems. I grok weird trunk locks, I know far more than I ever wanted about Fiat 500 trunk handles and resistors.
I’m astonished at the lousy gas mileage. My old F150 gets 17 mpg, and it has a V8 and is 20′ long
Road trip question I always ask: Did anything catch on fire?
If not, pretty good day.
It must be the somehow now there center caps on the rims.. were they not off in all the old posts??
Yeah they were off in the earlier posts. Personally I think it looks better with them. Just need to head to the junk yard and peel off some Nissan badges, preferably non-matching and double stick tape them onto the caps, preferably in a different place on each cap.
I agree , looks better with them on
I would chalk it up to the abysmal condition of the pavement on I-40 in Arizona. I’ve spent my entire life up and down the New Jersey Turnpike, and I have never driven on a highway as bad as I-40 in Arizona and New Mexico.
Combination of high summer temps, geologically active area, and all the semi truck traffic to and from Cali being heavy on the trailer axles due to the 40′ axle to kingpin law there all conspire to destroy that road. I avoid it at all costs.
I-5 between Seattle and Olympia has its issues. Old cement and big rocks that sometimes come loose. One of those rocks got kicked up and hit my Jetta’s windshield. I saw it coming and it sounded like a gunshot when it hit, but apparently VW was using very sturdy glass back then (2001 Jetta) because the rock didn’t even leave a crack in the windshield.
I’m just here to post how I loved the 757 (hot rod indeed), I miss flying on them, and I’m surprised they’re still in use by United. Lucky you!
Mercedes living dangerously by starting the trip with Angry Roof Shenanigans and still intends to open the thing on purpose.
You got to factor in the larger rolling diameter of the off road tires. So that 17mpg should calculate out to something more like say 18mpg.
THIS! People are used to the speedo being off, but they never seem to realize that they are underaccounting mileage!
With the big tires and gold tri wheels, I’m starting to warm up to the looks of this thing.
If you’re around Sedona, you’re about 30 miles from Jerome.
Where I can recommend the Asylum restaurant.
I’ve decided I’m only going to comment on food since this is the second time I’ve given restaurant advice.
I had a noise on one of our Volvos that I was sure was a front wheel bearing, turned out to be a halfshaft support bearing. Took a while to chase that one down….
Nissans are pretty much the Japanese equivalent of a GM car. They run terribly longer than most cars run. That’s why there are so many trashed Altimas running around – their Achilles heel is the CVT; if that doesn’t fail, they just keep (barely) running.
Just this past Sunday I diagnosed a persistent ticking sound that tracked with wheel speed and a metallic grinding sound from the same front wheel. CV axle? Bearing? Stuck caliper? None quite satisfactory an explanation, but it’s fine, because:
There was a bit of gravel stuck in a sipe, and goofy caliper covers that had been slightly bent and were rubbing the rotors.
I was honestly expecting worse. Like, you only made it 200 feet total kind of worse. Still, I love a classic misadventure.
I was in Chicago for Thanksgiving and got caught up in the snowstorm too (I didn’t realize until now it was such a big one, even for Chicago standards) and experienced my first ever flight cancellation, twice!
I was starting to have visions of being forced to share a hotel room with a shower curtain ring salesman.
We’re headed to Chicago right after Christmas, but we’re taking Amtrak. I hope to avoid this sort of crazy. I know, there are different kinds of crazy possible with a train, but hey – it’s a novelty for us!
Two of my family members’ trains from WI to Chicago were delayed due to fallen trees on the track.
Hey Mercedes! Since you’ve driven both, how does the CrossCab compare to, say, a similarly lifted Scion xB?
Having two sets of ears with weird noises is always helpful to track down where they might be coming from. I’ve had wheel bearings, in particular, throw me off because the sound seems to move when I’m in a different position. That leads to replacing a wheel bearing that you already replaced 4k miles ago and then having to go swap the other side because it really was the side you hadn’t done yet.
“That timing, to me, was honestly wild. As a lifelong resident of the Midwest, I had always pictured cities like Flagstaff and Phoenix being a day’s drive from Los Angeles, not mere hours.”
On my first solo cross-country drive I was kind of stunned that I drove from Rolla, MO to Tucumcari, NM in one one day.
I did Denver to Houston in one day once. Do not recommend.
San Diego to Denver in 1 day (17 hours). Beautiful but also do not recommend.
I did Houston to Albuquerque this year, also did it 5 years ago (in a stick shift XJ). Even in an automatic with radar cruise, that long of a drive wore on me this year. Had to do it again a month later as we were relocating and I cut it down by spending a night in Fort Worth. Worked better with the moving truck finishing early afternoon anyway.
Pittsburgh to Little Rock solo in a single day – I was completely torched when I pulled into my hotel.
Done the Pittsburgh to Tampa run a few times as well, but always with another driver.
Cleveland, Oh to Helena, MT in 30 hours straight. Can’t say it was one day but it sure was exhausting.
Younger me went with a teacher friend decades ago. Xmas break for her and living in SF for awhile for me. We took 4 hour turns. Southern route. 29 hours. She had a BMW. I went through Kansas post midnight at well over 100 mph. I found out later that the car died on her solo return trip. Like new engine died. She was very attractive and a younger me had a full on crush which went exactly nowhere. But dang we saw whales coming up highway 1, and I took her to a Firesign Theatre gig in SF. If you know who they were you too are old
Buddy and I in college did Albuquerque to New Orleans with only gas/food stops and 1 sheer exhaustion close-eyes-for-an-hour stop…DO NOT RECOMMEND! LOL
How about Denver to San Fran in 15 hours? Sorry, was watching Vanishing Point the other night 🙂
Praise the highway system!
“As a lifelong resident of the Midwest, I had always pictured cities like Flagstaff and Phoenix being a day’s drive from Los Angeles, not mere hours.”
As a kid who watched Airwolf I marvelled how Dominick and SFH always seemed to get from LAX to Monument Valley in 5 minutes.
I’ve done Fort Wayne to Houston/Houston to Fort Wayne in one day several times. I decided this past Saturday when I hit Texarkana on the way back to Houston that I am too old for this shit and will be flying next time.
Ten years ago I did 31 hours straight from Fort Wayne to Phoenix. It was a worse idea than you probably think it is.
760 miles. Average day for me(long haul trucker)
Come to Europe, and you can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in different countries, and not even have to drive that far.
Technically I could drive 5 or six hours and be in Canada, if I knew where my passport was and it was valid.
I could drive a lot farther, into Newfoundland, and take a ferry into France.
Ft Smith, AR to Kingman, AZ in one day. Would never do again.
I’ve had wheel noises like that from the plate behind the brakes being slightly bent, and rubbing against things worse in a right turn than a left turn.
Ugh. Splash shields. Their main purposes in life seem to be, in no particular order, accumulating mud and ice and slush and muck in order to make strange noises from stuff rubbing on the brake discs, turning into the metallic equivalent of Swiss cheese because they accumulate ice and slush and muck, and getting inexplicably tweaked or bent so that they can make more noise by intermittently rubbing against the brake discs, while at the same time mightily resisting any attempt to tweak or bend them back into the correct shape so they stay quiet…
I think they often get bent by careless wheel installation/removal. I think that because I’ve done it when changing wheels in an awkward space and it’s not hard to do if you tip the wheel in and knock the plate. Easy to fix, at least.
I’ve never bent one in all the countless tire rotations and brake work I’ve done myself. But then my wife’s Grand Caravan went to the shop to get new tires, and came back with both rear wheel splash shields lightly grazing the rotors on turns… So, yes it checks out.
They’re marginally useful for keeping brake dust from getting absolutely everywhere, but up in the Rust Belt they tend to disintegrate over time and become as much of a problem as they are a solution.
That’s pretty bad if a tire shop is doing it. I was swapping with barely enough room between the car and a wall for the wheel and me and I caught it when I did it.
The thing I find that gets people the most is that it doesn’t have to touch when stationary, so they wouldn’t believe me when I told them that was the likely source of that terrible metallic scraping noise they couldn’t ID. I’d tell them to bend it away anyway so they could come back and prove me wrong. They were always amazed when it worked because they didn’t realize how much things can flex.
Or they fall off. I finally removed mine at my mechanic’s advice.
They’re also great for making it needlessly incredibly hard to measure rotor thickness.
Depending where you end up in sedona-
Gs burgers are great. BoSa donuts in oak creek rock. And my wife loves filibertos.
Best part of any new car, early part of a road trip, or at a critical point of travel are these two great conversation starters: “What’s that noise?” and “You smell something burning?”
Ooh, Sedona is a great place for trail driving. Watch out for the pink jeep tours!
Would you rather experience “what’s that noise?” or “what’s that smell?” while road-tripping?
I think I’d prefer a noise. Smells are usually more urgent.
Counterpoint: smells can come from outside the vehicle (e.g. from other cars) and may not mean anything is wrong with your vehicle
Smells can also come from inside the vehicle, and may not mean anything is wrong with your vehicle.
The degree of urgency related to said smell may vary.
Depends who else is in the car with you.
Today is a good day for both!