Thursday, Jun 28, 2012 at 08:38
I feel for you Broodie , as I now have an auto 4800 Patrol and its auto can get confused and swap gears more than it should.
We aslo have an R51 in our extended family and the manual is indeed filled with descriptions of all sorts of sub systems and its hard to sort it out.
A 4wd course won't help a lot unless they specificaly know your vehicle and its systems - check this if you go down that path.
I always like to collect the relevant info on any issue and as one part of this go to Nissan - be persistent and ask the questions.
However from our experience I can tell you 2 things that work in mud and track sand (not tried on beach).
First is that the R51 has very limited wheel travel , much less than equivalent cars like Prados, this makes the electronic sub systems come in both earlier and harder.
A
suspension change is required to fix this - 40mm lifts and even lower tyre pressures like 10 psi will help with effective
suspension trave.
Second is an issue specific to the autos, autos are actually surposed to be better in sand and this can be true as they change gear faster and hence less momentum is lost and momentum is king in sand.
What you don't get told is that some autos can get into a mode where they swap back and forth several times as load comes on/off and the net loss is more than a single manual shift.
One thing you can do about this is drive in high range more than is reccomended in sand/mud , this keeps the transmission in torque converter mode and revs higher with less gear changing.
This mode uses more fuel and heats up oil more but this is no real issue for short beach runs.
Check this mode of driving out , we ran a test sequence up a 150m 30 degree upslope in which we recorded some 20 gear changes in low range and I think it was 2 or 3 in high range.
Quite a revealing test actually.
AnswerID:
489583