07-29-2009, 04:34 PM
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#11 (permalink)
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A True Z Fanatic
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Houston, TX
Posts: 4,024
Drives: too slow
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chubbs
No, please don't lock the thread - it's the most important concern to have surfaced so far and there may still be further developments. This thread is the main area for discussion and it should remain open for new additions.
For example, I cannot understand this phrase from the Nissan statement - "...The addition of an oil cooler would have raised the price of the car and potentially moved it out of the reach of some customers..."
That is blatantly rubbish - It would probably cost Nissan $300 max to have fitted an oil cooler to the cars. If they passed that cost onto customers in the basic price of the car nobody would have noticed, but everyone would have said, "Woooo fantastic, it's got an oil cooler!"
The real reason for the ****-up is threefold -
1. they're obsessed with keeping the cost of the car down to the bare minimum
2. they're obsessed with keeping the weight of the car down to the bare minimum
3. they didn't realise the oil overheating issue was going to get as big as it has - and now they are toughing it out.
There are too many examples on this forum of people getting oil overheating on the public highway for it not to be an issue.
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It's not just parts cost, it's testing cost, and warranty costs. There's no getting around the fact that a pair of flexible hoses carrying the most vital fluid in your car is less reliable than keeping it all in the block. There's also no getting around the fact that if they added it at the factory, it would have to be warrantied just like the rest of the car. They would have had to engineer brackets and fittings and sheaths and whatnot to try to bring the reliability up to par with the rest of the car, and done extensive long-term-wear simulation, etc. I have no idea how to work out what that costs in the long term in a car price. Let's say it ended up being $1000 or $1500 (not unreasonable, considering they're selling an unwarrantied and less-engineered addon cooler for $700).
Car prices are cutthroat these days, and a grand here or there on the mfg side of things isn't chump change. This is before all the percentages for various markups and taxes too.
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