Nissan VH41DE / VH45DE

V8 · naturally aspirated · petrol · 1989–present

Also known as: vh41de, vh45de, vh41, vh45, infiniti q45 v8

Nissan's first V8 — the 4.1 VH41DE and 4.5 VH45DE — in the Infiniti Q45 and the Japanese-market President.

It was built to a standard the cars around it did not need. All-aluminium, four camshafts, and in the VH45DE a variable-lift system Nissan did not use again — an engine designed to prove a point against Lexus's 1UZ, and by most accounts it did.

Its complaints are age rather than design: distributor and coil failures with heat, an air-flow meter that skews fuelling as it ages, and oil leaks from seals now thirty years old.

Parts are the constraint. It was fitted to very few cars, it was replaced by the VK45DE — which has its own page here and shares almost nothing — and specialist knowledge outside Japan is thin.

Cars fitted with this engine

2 generations, across 1 make. From the authored catalogue — an absent car means the catalogue has not reached it, not that the engine was never fitted.

Infiniti

Information, not instruction

CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.

Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.

Posted about this engine

Be the first to write this up

Nothing posted about this yet. Whatever you found is worth writing down — even a dead end saves someone the same afternoon.

What makes one worth reading:

The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
What you measured, not only what you replaced.
What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.