fantastic car, beautiful styling, extremely practical

I absolutely loved my Murano. I bought it when it was exactly 1 year old with 24,000 miles on it and saved $10,000 off MSRP. Mine had just about every bell and whistle you could get on a Murano: premium sound, leather, satellite navigation, AWD, ABS, cruise control, sliding sun roof, dual climate control, you name it.

From the day I bought this car I never had a single problem with it. The quality was exceptional and I never had any of the problems others are reporting here such as windows opening by themselves, doors locking themselves, etc. etc.

This vehicle is incredibly practical. You can fold down the rear seats and have a ton of space to haul stuff around in the back. The transmission is fantastic and works perfectly, the engine is strong with lots of passing power. It's not going to win many 1/4 mile races but it's still pretty peppy off the line. Gas mileage is not the greatest but that's the usual tradeoff if you want horsepower so I don't consider it to be unreasonable. Around town I got around 16-17 mpg and on trips I got around 22-24 mpg. The satellite navigation system is a godsend if you are on vacation and need help finding places and you only know the street address. At first it was a little confusing learning to operate it but once I read the instruction manual it turned out to be rather simple to operate.

The tire pressure monitoring system is really slick as well. At one point 3 of my tires had about 32-33 psi in them and one had dropped to 28 psi. The car would beep at me and inform me that I had a flat tire whenever I got in it. I would have never know one tire was low without this system. Sure enough I had a screw in one tire and it caused a slow leak. I could imagine that since the pressure didn't drop much once it got down to 28 that I could have driven on this tire this way for months not knowing there was a screw in it. This could have caused more rapid wear on the tire and other issues if left unchecked so I was really impressed with this feature. The only drawback to this system was that it doesn't tell you which tire is the one that is low so I had to check all 4 tires to find the one that was low.

The computer system also tells you when you're due for an oil change or due to rotate your tires. That is another handy feature. The trip computer also has all of the other usual features such as "distance to empty", average fuel mileage, etc. and everything worked exactly as it was supposed to.

Visibility is great and I never noticed any blind-spots while driving. Comfort is exceptional, even on long trips. 500 mile days are not a problem at all for this car. I'm not sure how noisy it is on the road because I'm one of those people that ALWAYS has the stereo on whenever I'm in the car, and it's usually up pretty loud. The BOSE Premium stereo system in this vehicle, by the way, is probably the best sounding factory stereo system I've ever heard. With the subwoofer (that's hidden on top of the spare tire) you get strong tight bass as well as crystal clear highs. You know the stereo is designed right when you set the treble and bass in the middle and it sounds perfect. This stereo does just that.

As for the rest of the controls, they are easy to operate and fairly intuitive. The only thing I never did figure out is why, if you set a temperature on the climate control, and set it on automatic, and let's say it's 50 degrees outside and the temp control is set at say 72, why does the A/C light come on? The car heats as it is supposed to but the A/C light is on!?!? If you push the A/C button to turn it off the "Auto" light also goes off, so it's really confusing. I learned to just set it at a temp I wanted and ignore the A/C light. It will heat and/or cool as needed.

I really can not think of too many things I did not like about this vehicle. It drove very nice, smooth and quiet and comfortable. It handled very well for an SUV also. I never felt like I was about to tip over when cornering hard. It drives more like a station wagon than an SUV, very low center of gravity and very sure footed.

I was very surprised to read about all of the problems some owners have had and I think they are just more vocal than the owners (like me) that are more than happy with their Murano's so I figured I would let you all know that most owners do not have any problems and are extremely happy with their purchase.

So you might be asking yourself "if you were so happy with it why don't you own it any more?". That is a fair question. I'm a recently divorced 40-something guy that decided the 350Z Roadster was more my style and I'm a rather impulsive buyer so I went out and traded this in on the Z. Check out my review of that car as well. I ended up having to also buy a used 4WD Jeep Grand Cherokee to go with the Z to gain back what I lost by getting rid of the Murano. What can I say, I'm not the wisest person in the world when it comes to spending money but I'm happy, and that's all that matters, right? ;o)