Bad news from a North American GT-R Owners Club member: Apparently you can't launch your new Nissan GT-R or take the VDC off for racing spirited driving as all activity is recorded in the GT-R's black box data recorder and then used by Nissan techs to void your warranty by "proving" that you were racing.

As it stands, it looks like a handful of unfortunate GT-R owners might be getting the shaft from Nissan. Last Saturday, a GT-R owner on the NAGTROC forums posted his experience of dealing with Nissan after he starting hearing a loud noise coming from the rear of his car and took it in to get it checked out.


He says the dealer didn't even touch his car -- rather, two techs from Nissan's Tennessee headquarters showed up to look at the car and record the noise, and then 4 days later two techs from Japan came, download some info from the car and left.

A short while later, the dealer gives him the much-anticipated ring but proceeds to tell him the bad news: Sorry sir, but it looks like the car was driven too much without the VDC turned on and now the transmission is destroyed. Sorry but we can't cover it. The cost for a new tranny is 20 large. Have a nice day sir.

Damn! Ouch! We're sure that's not how it went down per se, but the message is still the same from Nissan: "We can prove that you drove the car hard, so you must have been racing. And since our warranty doesn't cover racing, you're screwed buddy!

That is low-life behavior and Nissan knows it. They will have to start acting properly very soon or there will be a lot off pissed-of GT-R owners out there. As forum member septskyline put it: "I know we shouldn't launch the car but why own it if you cant use this function, don't sell a car that goes 0-60 in 3.4 sec if the only way you can achieve this speed is to void the warranty, false advertising."

We're sure something's not going as planned and Nissan will act soon to make-right the existing warranty claims and the many more that are already in the making, or even better, issue a recall to fix whatever weak link is causing this, but all we can do now is wait. 

Somewhere in the future, every new car will come equipped with some sort of "black box" data recorder from the factory in order to help dealers easily and cheaply weed-out claims, but on performance cars this could become a huge issue as we can see already. Best of luck to septskyline and the others out there in the same uncomfortable shoes. Hopefully you'll be back on the road in no time.


Source: NAGTROC via Autospies