Since you don't know your car's maintenance history, it's probably a good idea to drop the pan on the final "quick change" and clean out anything stuck to the magnets. I agree with the recommendation unless you're changing the beehive (which you'll do eventually if you add a cooler). There's also a paper filter underneath the beehive, but Nissan recommends never changing that. There's a screen in the Valve Body which it doesn't hurt to clean out if you're dropping the pan. I use Nissan NS3 in our '13 simply because I work at a dealership and for me it's cheap, but if I had to buy it at retail I'd use Eneos Eco for a gen4 like yours, probably Eneos N-plus for our '13 which is gen5. The only secret is the way it's been treated, fresh fluid like clockwork at 30K or less. The point is, it's been everyplace from Miami to Anchorage on the original trans without so much as a hiccup. Some part that can't be replaced due to age will eventually kill it, so at this point I have no doubt that the CVT will outlive the car. It will probably pass 500K miles sometime next year on the original CVT, although it's on its second engine and the rest of the car is starting to fall apart around it. I like to tell the story of one old Murano, a regular customer of one of our other techs. Keeping the metal off the metal is all that's required. By contrast, a well-maintained CVT can be a perpetual motion machine, because there's no sacrificial material to wear. No matter how well you treat it, sooner or later something will wear out. Think for a moment about the flip side of the CVT coin: Every conventional A/T has a finite maximum lifetime determined by clutch wear. Much of the CVT's reputation is the fault of Nissan and other OE's trying to reduce the "official cost of ownership" by ignoring the tranny as much as possible, but as a technician, it breaks my heart to see all the needless premature failures it provokes. You're most welcome! You can probably tell mistreatment of CVT's is a pet b#%ch of mine, so I try to set the record straight at every opportunity. Here's what an Altima 4-port beehive looks like, you can't miss it: Hayden and Dana/Tru-Cool both make some great coolers for DIY that don't cost a fortune, and 4-port hives can be had all over eBay and Amazon. Four hoses means a cooler or factory heat exchanger is already present. You can tell immediately if the car has a cooler by how many hoses come out of the "beehive" on the lower front of the tranny. Besides shear force in operation degrading the long-chain molecules in the fluid, heat is the other great enemy of CVT's. Lastly, if your new ride is a gen4 ('07~'12) with a QR25 engine, there's a good chance it lacks a transmission cooler. My customers have had fine results with both. You don't need to use Nissan fluid like the old days, AMSoil and Eneos both make fluids that equal or exceed NS2/NS3 in all categories and are completely miscible with Nissan fluid during the changeover. If you let the fluid degrade enough, the tranny will die. So while it won't gum-up the valve body in its old age like an A/T, it's also entirely dependent on the quality of the fluid to prevent metal from meeting metal. There are some decent vids around about how CVT's work, but basically you have a steel belt riding on two steel pulleys. For most people 30K is a good interval after that. Two quick changes will be best to remove at least 3/4 of the old fluid. So change your fluid immediately, it's way overdue and leaving it in there will pretty much guarantee catastrophe. CVT's never have that problem, simply because they have almost no clutch material to make soup out of. Nothing you know about conventional A/T's will apply to CVT's, including the concept of "ATF soup".
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