2015 Nissan Sentra Garners ‘Top Safety Pick’ Award from IIHS

The 2015 Nissan Sentra has been chosen as a ‘Top Safety Pick’ by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The award recognizes passenger vehicles with superior ratings in moderate overlap front, side, roof strength, and head restraint tests. Vehicles must also earn a “Good” or “Acceptable” rating in a small overlap frontal test. The Sentra scored “Good” in all five categories.

Buyers can expect standard safety features such as the Nissan Advanced Air Bag System (AABS); three-point front and rear seatbelts; front seat belts with pre-tensioners, load limiters, and adjustable upper anchors; and the LATCH System. Also included on every Sentra is an Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) with Electronic Brake force Distribution (EBD) and Brake Assist; Vehicle Dynamic Control (VDC) with Traction Control System (TCS); zone body construction featuring front and rear crumple zones and occupant zones; an energy absorbing steering column; child safety rear door locks; the Nissan Immobilizer system and anti-theft alarm system; a Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) with position monitoring; and a Bluetooth® Hands-free phone System.

When you purchase a new 2015 Nissan Sentra from Sheehy Nissan of Mechanicsville, you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with an extremely safe vehicle. Our superior customer service is just a bonus. Call, contact us online, or stop by today to schedule your test drive in the new Sentra or one of our other new Nissan vehicles.

Image: Nissan

Tips to Teach Your Teen Driver

Teaching your teen driver can often be a frustrating experience, resulting in hurt feelings on both sides, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when teaching your teen driver.

Confidence

Your teen driver may feel or seem confident, but sliding behind the wheel for the first time is an intimidating experience for anyone. Probably the number one reason for a lack of confidence behind the wheel is the belief that the car will be hard to control, and driving it may result in at least a dent, if not an accident. You have to keep your teenager’s confidence up. Practice in an open space where the risk of damage is minimal, and keep tempers down. Encouragement, not punishment, teaches.

Patience

You may not remember, but it will have taken you a long time to get used to driving a car, and in the early days of learning every operation of any control inside the car will require a lot of concentration on the part of your teen. Once you have been driving for a while, everything begins to occur automatically.

You may turn the car through a corner and accelerate, which you do pretty much automatically. What your teen is thinking while doing exactly the same thing is, “How far do I turn the wheel, is the car is travelling too fast for the corner, is there anything in the way, are there cars approaching, when is the best time to push on the accelerator pedal, where is the accelerator pedal, how far should I push the accelerator pedal down?” And that’s just a simple turn.

The car is a very complex machine to drive. After you have been doing it for a long time pretty much everything comes naturally and your brain hands many of the mundane chores to what people term “muscle memory.” Repetition over the years means your arms, eyes, ears, and feet know how to co-ordinate themselves to keep the car on the road. A teen does not do this straight away, and a lack of patience on the instructor’s side will only undermine the confidence of the teen.

Repetition

Again, this is where muscle memory comes in. It may seem boring, but get your teen driver to do the same thing over and over again. Find a local car park that’s as empty as possible (your teen will likely be intimidated if there are other cars even parked nearby, as they will be worried about going out of control and hitting them). Practice simple turns and shifting gears (if you are in a manual transmission car) to give your teen an idea of how accurately a car can be steered. Progress through more complicated maneuvers, concentrating on control and not speed. Let your teen “walk” the car around at very low speeds. The idea is to teach your teen how a car responds to inputs from the steering, accelerator, and braking actions.

Patience and understanding

Yes, patience again, but also understanding. Your teen will reach stages where they will feel out of their depth. If something does happen – say damage to the car – shouting will not help, and it will in fact hurt the teaching process. You have to trust your teen and your teen has to know that you have confidence in them, and understand that learning does involve the occasional fall.

Why Get Routine Maintenance at our Dealership?

It’s okay to admit it: sometimes fitting regular maintenance into your schedule can be tough. Your vehicle belongs on the road, not in a shop. But if you want to keep your vehicle running at its best, routine maintenance at our dealership can help.

Why bring your vehicle for regular maintenance? The short answer is that there are hundreds of variable to consider during the assessment of your vehicle, and our dealership has the skilled technicians to check each and every one. You may be able to analyze the health of your tire tread, state of your engine oil, and life of your brake pads, but by the time you have assessed all of these factors, another part of your vehicle may be suffering.

We are happy to give your car a thorough investigation and check all of these variables in a timely manner so that we can pin point a problem if there is one.

Another reason to keep service appointments scheduled on a regular basis is that our highly-qualified technicians know of the latest developments within the automotive service industry. You may be fully capable of identifying an issue with your car, but you might not have all the up-to-date information, repair techniques and OEM materials that we possess.

We are also happy to provide our expertise to you for the sake of your vehicle’s health.

We invite you to schedule your service appointment at Sheehy Nissan of Mechanicsville, or ask us about express service where no appointment is necessary. We look forward to helping you keep your vehicle in tip-top shape!

Family Fun Guide for St. Patrick's Day

Spring is around the corner, which means it’s almost time to celebrate one of the greenest holidays around – St. Patrick’s Day. Whether you and your family is Irish or not, March 17^th is a fun excuse to come together, celebrate, and maybe even learn a little something while you’re at it. Don your favorite emerald shade and take a look at this list of fun family activities to make this St. Paddy’s Day extra lucky.

Pot o’ Gold Treasure Hunt

This game is fun for the whole family, and couldn’t be easier. Find the most appropriate treasure holder you’ve got – bowl, box, bag, anything – and bonus points if it’s green. Fill it with gold chocolate coins, hide it somewhere in your house and send the kids on a treasure hunt. If you feel like going above and beyond, write up some clues to make the hunt more challenging, create a makeshift rainbow and put your “pot o’ gold” at the end.

Fun with Food

Plan on trying a traditional Irish recipe for dinner, and for extra fun for the kids, turn everything green in between! Add some food coloring to scrambled eggs to make green eggs and ham, and bake some delicious green cupcakes or shamrock-shaped cookies. You can even go so far as to encourage all green vegetables in the name of Irish pride – but good luck with that one. You might be better off whipping up some shamrock shakes.

Find a Parade

What’s not to like about the festive fun of a parade? Check to see if there will be a St. Patrick’s Day parade in your area, and bring your kids to watch. Better yet, dress up in your best Irish garb before you go – “Kiss Me I’m Irish” hat and all.

History Lesson

If your family does have Irish heritage, St. Patrick’s Day is the perfect time to teach the kids a little family history. Get together to look through old photos or tell family stories. Irish or not, you can also learn a little about the history of St. Patrick’s Day, and how it became a holiday here in the U.S. You can even give your kids a little quiz at the end to test their knowledge, and reward them with a chocolate coin or two.

Clover Crafts

It may be hard to find your own lucky four-leaf clovers outside, but you can make your own at home with your kids for a fun holiday craft. Cut shamrocks out of green construction paper or craft foam and arm your kids with glitter glue, markers, and stickers. Once the shamrocks dry, hang them around the house to decorate and celebrate your kids’ creativity. 

Automatic vs. Manual Transmissions: Which is Right for You?

When you get behind the wheel and pull out of that parking lot or driveway, do you like to shift gears yourself or would you rather have a transmission that does the work for you? Put another way, do you prefer manual or automatic transmissions? Perhaps a better question is as follows: which is better suited for you?

This will of course be dependent on many factors. While personal preference plays perhaps the biggest role, there are other things to consider as well, such as the driver's age, physical condition, multi-tasking skill level, and even where the vehicle in question will primarily be driven. With that established, let's examine each of these factors for a moment:

Many younger drivers enjoy shifting gears manually. For starters, the technique is not as hard to learn as some would lead one to believe, and it's actually fun. A sizable portion of this demographic, particularly automotive enthusiasts, can't envision driving a car without a manual transmission, and contrary to popular belief, this includes both genders. Many drivers begin to prefer automatic transmissions as they age. Of course, this isn't always the case, but for most, the passage of time also brings more aches and pains that pushing a clutch pedal and moving that shifter, can aggravate. This brings up the issue of physical condition.

The fact of the matter is that we don't stay 20 years old forever. As the years pass, our bodies age and certain muscles can become more worn and thus weaker than they used to be. Perhaps a touch of arthritis has affected the hands and/or legs and feet. In the case of pushing a clutch pedal with your foot while shifting with one hand, this can become cumbersome and even uncomfortable. If any of these issues plague you, then an automatic transmission makes life a lot easier when driving. There is far less multitasking involved. Just put the selector into Drive and go!

Where will you be doing most of your driving? Do you commute to work or school across wide, open spaces in a rural setting, or do you deal with bumper-to bumper traffic and stoplights situated every few hundred feet? Do you live in a mild climate, or do you see snow and ice for half the calendar year?

If you are blessed with an open highway, either type of transmission is equally suitable, but if you must routinely deal with urban congestion, an automatic makes more sense. Certainly, some people drive cars equipped with standard transmission in these settings, but the constant stop-and-go traffic is hard on a manual clutch. Likewise, a warm climate free of the ravages of winter is appropriate for either an automatic or manual, but in snowy and icy locations, vehicles equipped with manual transmissions have the advantage of better traction. If you're stuck in a snowbank, for example, placing the drivetrain manually into a low gear results in nearly as much gripping power as a vehicle equipped with 4-wheel or all-wheel drive. As for ordinary 2-wheel drive automatics? They will have a tougher time.

In days past, cars with manual transmissions got better fuel economy, but this is not necessarily true anymore. Automatic transmissions have made great advances in recent years, and many cars with today's examples will enjoy the same fuel mileage as their manual counterparts. Another factor many overlook is that while manual transmissions cost less initially and can last a good 30%-50% longer than those that shift themselves, there's a catch: the clutch typically has to be replaced at some point, and this isn't a cheap repair by any means. By the time this inevitable cost is factored in, the lifetime expense of that manual transmission will end up being about the same as that of an automatic. Finally, it is important to note that in the US, there are a lot more vehicles equipped with automatics than stickshifts. In fact, the ratio of automatics to manuals is about 9 to 1, and it's quite possible that the standard transmission will soon become a thing of the past.

The discerning car shopper is advised to take the factors listed above into consideration, but in the end, it all comes down to a matter of preference and practicality. A Sheehy Nissan of Mechanicsville sales associate will be happy to help you find the driving style that's right for you