370Z May, 2009, sales lowest since launch......

Rans

Thanks Semtex, that gives me a better perspective on this. It does seem kind of cheesy of them. Looking at all the mods you've done to your car, are there any warranty issues there? Or is Nissan ok because it is all external?

semtex

It wouldn't surprise me if Nissan tried to make an issue of my mods if I ever submit a warranty claim (knock on wood). And to be honest, if I have some problem with the emissions system one day and they blame it on my exhaust mods, okay, that's fair game. That's not something I'd pitch a fit over. I wouldn't like it, of course, but I accept the risk.

In my view, however, there's a two-fold difference with the oil cooler. First, an oil cooler is a protective device. Its purpose is not to yield more power (like intakes and CBEs, for example), but to protect the engine. Why penalize someone for going the extra mile to protect their engine? I mean, with that logic, they might as well penalize folks for using high-quality synthetic oil that 'goes the extra mile' in engine protection beyond the minimum standards documented in the owner's manual. Doesn't make sense to me. Secondly, the fact that they themselves equipped the vehicles they supplied to the press fleet with oil coolers is significant. How can Nissan penalize someone for doing something that they did themselves with a straight face? Let's go back to my exhaust mods for a moment. I've said that if they deny me warranty coverage based on my exhaust mods, I can live with that. But what if we were to discover that the Z's they supplied to the press fleet were secretly equipped with Stillen exhausts and Berk HFCs? That'd change the landscape, wouldn't it? It's just a hypothetical, obviously, because the Stillen exhaust didn't even exist at the time. But it still serves to illustrate the point I'm trying to make here, which is that it doesn't make sense for a company to penalize customers for doing to their cars what the company did themselves.

But this is just my view on the issue. I'm sure others may see things differently, and that is certainly their prerogative.

__________________
"There are no small accidents on this circuit." -- Ayrton Senna
316.8whp & 248 ft/lbs (Dyno Dynamics) | 319whp & 256 ft/lbs (DynoJet) (04/23/10)
Stillen G3 CAI, CBE, Pulley / F.I. LTH / GTSpec Ladder Brace / Setrab Oil Cooler / UpRev-tuned by Forged Perf.

wellarmed

What Nissan needs to consider is..... this oil temp issue going unresolved is real bad press for the market that they are trying to sell this kind of car to.
The question is....... can they be slapped awake enough to do the right thing.

I'll bet the people at Nissan who engineered this car, knew it should have a cooler and wanted it to have a cooler, but got over-ruled when it came down to comming up with that final price point.

They let some bean counter decide to take care of the oil over temp issue by using the built-in 'limp mode' and "that took care of that!"
No doubt that sounded like the perfect sollution for keeping some 'enthusiest' from overheating the motor to him.

The problem is... that looks exactly like what it is. A halfassed shortcut to save money at the expense of necessary engineering, and at this point their response to what to do about it now is looking alot like what many of us came to expect from Detroit.

Maybe Nissan should go back and consider exacxtly why so many Americans stopped buying the big three and starting buying Honda/Toyota/Nissan.

Maybe the current economy and the decision to curtail production related to that will hide the fact that there may be a significant number of potential 'enthusiest' buyers going elsewhere due to the oil temp issues. Nissan will probably only see that they have demand equal to what they're making now and not care about doing the right thing.