Auto News 5

The Altima V-6 certainly provides very eager throttle response and lots of power. There's a bit of torque steer, that tug at the front wheels under hard acceleration, but it's not bothersome. I was merging onto a freeway in the Altima and the merge lane traffic didn't have much of anywhere to go due to heavy traffic in adjoining lanes, so I was in one of those situations where I either needed to brake hard and dawdle, waiting for traffic to clear, or else gun it. Naturally, I chose to gun it, and the Altima's V-6 responded without hesitation, propelling the car from 55 to 80 mph easily and sounding pretty good while it did so. Nissan, which committed to continuously variable transmissions years ago, has come a long way in its CVT engineering. I didn't even remember that the Altima had a CVT until the second day I drove it.