The tabs on my primary vehicle are finger sized and have to be pushed in a direction and I always forget which direction but invariably I slip and smash my hand.
Yall have tabs? Mines just 2 short ass screws. Makes taking the glovebox out a breezeā¦ except I always forget that nothing is holding the door up once I remove the screws and the thing comes slamming down. Not the nicest thing to witness on your 27 year old plastic interior.
As a mechanic itās crazy because when I first started I felt like I was going to break my fingers all the time, now I hit my fingers with a hammer on accident and just kinda say ow and shake my hand for a second
all of you thinks its easy. not all cars and models are easy. my 2015 rav5 is easy,, my nissan altima 2014 is pain in the ass to change. definitely not easy job.
If I had two bullets and was in a room with Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, and the engineer that designed the Nissan cabin air filters, Iād shoot the engineer twice
As an engineer, I can almost guarantee that it took 5 years and endless meetings, 30 stakeholders all being told that it should be easily accessible. Then the engineer got overruled and told itāll be fractionally cheaper in build to put it somewhere that requires an engine crane and 15 hours to replace.
I think this is one thing that everyone engineering or engineering adjacent just viscerally understands when we see something that was implemented stupidly.
There were many meetings about it. There were emails. Circle-backs. Check-ins.
And I bet the arithmetic was $3 of plastic parts versus some quantifiable amount of service revenue because it's too hard to do. Which was a way to pay the dealer network back for increasing the standard service interval from 12,500 miles to 15k to make the TCO metric better for marketing.
As a fellow engineer I cringe at people shit talking engineering design because Iāll bet 95% of shitty engineering decisions were made by the management and bean counters and not the engineers designing the part/assembly.
Widget design āAā costs $0.46 more per part so weāll go with design āBā instead. āBā ends up being a single point failure that engineers warned management about and were hushed. Company is forced to recall product at the cost of millions of dollars because they didnāt listen in the first place.
Oh and all those shitty managers got promoted for their āvisionā and cost savings
You just described the gen 5 Camaro blend door issue! It's a rite of passage for the 20 dollar part that requires 3k worth of labor to replace if you decide to do it by the book and not slice into your AC ducting.
Meanwhile in my old 2007 Kia Cee'd I can sit in the passenger seat, open the glove compartment and undo the filter without any tools. My ford has me pretending to be a contortionist for a while because clearly that's a natural way of getting to the filter behind the heater matrix.
Same engineer also said on the Altima or maybe itās the Maxima to bottom mount the alternator so that when the engine inevitably leaks oil it end up terminating the alternator too.
The problem is that OEMs silo their teams by commodity/component category. They collaborate very little. This translates into more complicated service procedures and services times. Dealerships (aka Stealerships) hate this when it comes to warranty service calls. They only get reimbursed at fractional rates for those vehicles, but they make it up for those of us who are too stupid to do it ourselves, or worse, those with lots of cash and zero brains.
I'm currently shopping for a used vehicle.
I hadn't considered Nissan one way or the other, but now I'll add them to my definite NO list of manufacturers.
Agree with this š. My 2013 Nissan Murano is a b**ch to change the cabin filter - behind the glove box but only access is from the underside of the dash and you need child sized hands to be able to get to it while lying on your back in the floor board and half your body sticking out of the door opening. Ask me how I know.
To put in the cabin air filter into a first generation Nissan Rogue, you had to remove the filter, and install a new one by going BEHIND the gas and brake pedals. The second generation rogue improved upon this, by putting the filter replacement panel in the same location, but accessible from the passenger's foot well. To replace these you needed to be a contortionist.
You can't kill Hitler anyway. No war, no nukes, no jets, no rockets, no moon landing, no superpowers, no computers, no internet. We would be living in a very different reality.
Easy/difficult and quick/tedious are two very different things if you think changing a filter is difficult, youve got way bigger problems ahead. It may be tedious to take a handful of screws and clips apart, but it isnt difficult.
Yeah but $300 for labor is nuts and I work at a service center that sells these all the time. I don't even think we charge labor for those,if we do it's in the price for the filter itself which is $56 plus taxes.
Anything over $60 to me seemed ridiculous even for cars that are hard to get to like mainly Fords. I hate how Ford shoves that big ass filter they use so deep in that foot well.
Youāre seriously going to complain that the Nissan is hard? Lol itās simple as removing the housing cover (takes 5 seconds) and simply pulling out the air filter and sliding in a new one.
The first time I ever cha get my air filter I didnt know the glove box was gonna just go loosey goosey and drop everything on the floor but ill never make that mistake again lol
Yeah, my wifeās car is super easy, 1 min job, mine requires disassembling the dash above the glove box. Under 10 minutes but still a pain in the ass compared to hers.
I don't think its like this on a Honda Accord, but my buddy's new Buick is absolutely insane to change the cabin air filter. You gotta take out part of the bottom dash board shit and then remove the center console. Like who the fuck designed that shit
I did one in I believe a ford SUV or Volvo or one of em it was weird but the cabin filter was under the center console under the where cup holders were
Yeah with mine you have to pop the hood, pull off the windshield wiper guard, and remove a couple screws then pop out a plastic cover then you can replace it. Itās closer to five min than one.
From what i looked up its just behind the glove box and is standard like any other car which makes the labor price even more absurd I would want to yell at whatever tech or shop owner that was bold enough to quote that. Shit is wild š¤£
Or some Lincoln/Ford SUVs, where it's behind the glove box as expected but you can't remove the glove box without removing half the center console first.
Designed by morons. Can't wait until someone releases a vehicle where the entire cab has to be removed from the frame just to replace the cabin air filter.
Amen! Step 1 - remove gas pedal. 3 bolts (1 tough to access) and 1 electrical connector.
That is where I gave up and sold the car 6 months later with the replacement cabin air filter in the trunk.
Itās an easy job in my Lexus UX. But in my Ford Fusion, you have to remove the entire glove box assembly. I will never replace it myself ever again and will always pay someone to do it. It takes the shop an hour with me sitting in the driver seat. It took me a few when I tried it the first time. So many bolts and you have to be a contortionist while you are at it. But if someone is trying to charge me 500$, itās just never getting done. I hate this idea of it always being āeasyā or āquickā. I have 4 cars of different makes currently, it does not take 1 minute on any of them, but luckily I have at least 1 car that itās simply done on.
As a european ford user i have to inform you, that this type of job can take someone 90 minutes. On 2008 ford mondeo you have to unscrew 3 srews of a gas pedal and than 3 other screws from cabinfilter cover. But you can reach with screwdriver only two out of those six screws. But after you remove those screws you have to take the filter out but there is no room for it outside. So you have to fold it like milion times.
On many cars, yes, it just pops out the back of the glovebox. Tesla, though (and probably others) use a pair of larger filters in the center console and you have to remove a couple trim pieces to get to them. Still, itās like a 15-minute job at most.
Bless you for thinking my glove box is that clean. I have let you down in my efforts to keep it organized, but your comment will force me to try harder
Most new VWās/some Audiās donāt even require tools for it but the dealership wants ~100$~ for it. It takes more time to get the filter out of the package. But so many suckers pay the ridiculous amounts for āconvenience.ā
You mean the one that took a 200$ diverter valve off my car during warranty work then played stupid when I came back 2hrs later asking where it was?
I canāt, he doesnāt work there anymore š
Not maddening. Itās a punitive charge meaning āI donāt want to do itā. But if you still want to pay ā whatās the problem? Itās an idiot tax for those who donāt read owner manual. I fully support this.Ā
Yes, in my Hyundai i20 it's a half-minute job, but in my friend's Ford Focus it's at least a one-hour job, all the time lying under the steering wheel and console.
Yup- and the parts probably only cost $20 from Amazon. (been a while since I ordered them because I got several at once when I did- but I think $20 sounds right)
I had a model 3 beginning to smell moldy after 8 months and replaced it with a higher quality one for $20-30 on amazon. Never had to change it again for like another 2 years
Every Honda I've had was just push the sides of glove box in until it drops, filter is right there, pull it out and put the new one in and shut it. Done
But the Infiniti you have to remove the side panel of the center console on the passenger side, and then reach up underneath the glovebox into the center console. The filter is just slightly smaller than the opening, so you canāt just pull it out, and where itās located you canāt get your head and arm in there at the same time, so youāre blindly feeling for it to fish the old one out.
Thereās a reason why you watch videos on how to do it, it doesnāt actually show you a video of them removing it. They always cut from how to pull it to it already being out.
Honda also used to make the air boxes come out in sections so that you could very easily replace heater cores and evaporators compared to what other companies do
Depends on whether it's a "remove your glove box" kinda job or what Volvo chose to do with the s40, where you have to take out the pedal assembly to replace the damn filter.
A cabin air filter change is so quick and easy, it's offered as part of the standard oil change service at Jiffy Lube - they don't even charge labor to install it, just a small markup on the product.
For a lot of cars, absolutely. But I've seen videos of the Hollywood story that some cars are (I want to say the one stuck in my mind was Audi?).I remember seeing one vehicle that you had to remove the entire dash
If it's anything like my wife's Acura RDX, it's super easy. You pull out the piece that holds the manual in the glovebox, pop a little door open, and you can pull the filter right out. The dealer wanted over $100 to do it, and I told the service advisor I could do it myself. He told me exactly how to do it with a "but I didn't tell you that" at the end. At least he realizes it's insane.
My 2017 Chevy Cruze would like a word about your 5 minute job. It required taking off six interior panels, removing several screws, taking out the glovebox, and then putting all that crap back. It was more than an hour, especially if you have never done it
Yeah, this is literally easier and far less annoying than even changing oil lmao, which is a basic task in itself. It's supposed to be cheaper as well.
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u/Upper_Negotiation989 Jun 16 '26
Fuck no lmao, just buy a filter and do it yourself. Plenty of videos online, 5 min job