Also known as: vq40de, 4.0 v6, navara v6, pathfinder 4.0, frontier engine
The 4.0-litre member of Nissan's VQ family — the engine of the Pathfinder, Navara, Frontier and Xterra, and the truck-duty relative of the VQ35 that sits in the cars.
It shares the family's general durability, and the item most worth knowing is not the engine at all: on a defined range of these vehicles, a failure in the radiator allowed coolant into the automatic transmission cooler circuit, mixing coolant with transmission fluid and destroying the gearbox. It became known as the "strawberry milkshake" failure, and it means a coolant loss complaint on one of these deserves the transmission fluid inspected as part of the same job.
The engine's own recurring items are timing-chain guides at high mileage, the crankshaft position sensor, and — because these are working vehicles — the consequences of dust ingestion where air filtration has been neglected. As with the VQ35, its transverse and longitudinal installations differ substantially in access.
Cars fitted with this engine
5 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.
Information, not instruction
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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
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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.
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