My Steering Lock Experience

doesntcount

On the evening of Tuesday, February 5th, 2013, I left work for the day only to discover my car wouldn't start. I hoped that it was something as simple as a dead battery, but after trying to jump it without success, I did some googling which lead me to numerous posts (almost all on the370z.com) that suggested it was a failed steering lock.

I left my car stranded in the parking lot that night, did more research, and got a ride to work the next day, armed with a hammer with which I tried to jolt the mechanism to signal to my car that the steering lock was indeed disengaged which would allow me to start the car. This was unsuccessful.

Fearing a huge bill, I nonetheless towed my car to the Nissan dealership in town who, after a few hours of diagnostics, confirmed that it was indeed the steering lock. The cost to repair, including diagnostics, parts and labour, was over $1600!

To say that I was devastated was an understatement. For a car that is barely 3 years old and with less than 20000 miles to fail in such a way was terrible luck.

When I discovered the prevalancy of steering lock failures in 370Zs, I became angry. The realization that this wasn't bad luck, so much as poor practices by Nissan, was infuriating. Not that I'm intolerant to failing parts, but for a car manufacturer to not recognize that this part should be recalled was what was particularly frustrating.

So, with the encouragement of my service rep at my dealership, I submitted a complaint to Nissan Consumer Affairs and formally asked them that I wished for them to cover the repair, and at the very least, the cost of the part. This process was not as smooth as it could have been because my situation is complicated by the fact that I purchased my car in the US, but I live in Canada. This made it unclear which division of Nissan should handle it. Eventually, Nissan North America provided Nissan Canada with the data they required, but it took weeks to get that straightened out. The rep at Nissan Canada finally called my service rep for details, which he provided. He confirmed with them that I do take my car for service at the dealership and that I was a loyal customer.

In the end, Nissan agreed to cover the entire cost of the repair, parts and labour, on the condition that the service department eat the cost of the diagnosis. They graciously agreed to those terms and I got my car back yesterday (22 days later) with an operation JF00D steering lock.

I'm writing this up in case anybody else finds themselves in this awful situation with an undrivable car that is barely old enough to be off-warranty and a looming $1600 bill.

One thing I've come to realize is that one possible reason that Nissan has not yet recalled the steering lock on the 370Z is that many of the followers of the370z.com forum have disabled their steering lock, meaning Nissan has no visibility into the prominence of the issue. My guess is that if we had all left our steering locks enabled, and all gone in to get them repaired, Nissan would have issued a recall years ago.

To Nissan's credit, and especially to the credit of my service department, they realized they are at least partly responsible. They've certainly garnered some brand loyalty from me, someone who isn't normally very brand-loyal.