Nissan Ireland Qashqai Recall Notice - July 2012

eorpach

Over the past number of months I have become suspicious that my Nissan Qashqai (2l, petrol) is consuming petrol fuel at a faster rate than it used it. The remaining mileage meter has been behaving wildly erratically. I probably should have brought it for servicing already; but I hadn't gotten around to it.

Today, I've received a letter from Nissan Ireland informing me that:

"Nissan has identifiend a potential issue relating to the fuel sender. In an extreme case the connection to the fuel pipe may split which could lead to a minor fuel seepage onto the ground underneath the vehicle. The repair will be replace the fuel sender unit in your vehicle. Nissan is not aware of any accidents or injuries associated with this issue and in the unlikely even that this concern occurs, you may be able to detect a fuel smell, or small traces of fuel on the ground underneath your vehicle."

This all sounds very fishy - why should they agree to an automatic replacement of the fuel sender unit on all cars, if it was the case that the fault described would only arise in an 'extreme case' ?

Does anybody else have similar experiences like the problem I'm describing? Surely the letter from Nissan confirms that I wasn't imagining my vehicle's decreased fuel efficiency in recent months?

Thanks,

eorpach

seamus

Just replacing the possibly suspect part is fairly typical in this kind of recall, nothing fishy about it really.

It's cheaper for the local mechanic to remove & replace the part rather than remove & inspect it and possibly miss a defective unit.

End-consumers are always happier with a recall if they're told that they're getting something new for free. They're less likely to comply with a recall if their car is just going to be inspected.

mickdw

What do you want them to do. They are taking the car in to do a free replacement of the suspect part which in most cases will have been a perfectly good part. If you had an issue, it will now be fixed.
Believe me, dealing with car manufacturers over faults can be a major headache where they will typically claim your fault is a one off and not a problem across the range.
A recall is a good result. The fact that you didn't think it bad enough to take the car into the garage before this would suggest that you didn't have much of an issue anyway.

Leonard Hofstadter

It's great to see Nissan being pro-active here.

If only ze Germans were similarly pro-active instead of pretending problems don't exist even though there are dozens of internet forums going on about all kinds of serious problems:rolleyes:! Defective timing chains (yes, BMW and VW can't even make a timing chain work these days:rolleyes:), injectors, oil pumps, turbos, swirl flaps (which will write off the engine if they fail), coil packs are all very real problems with a lot of modern German cars, but they're not recalling their cars over these basic design flaws and they are instead hoping that you will suck it up and pay scandalous amounts of money to fix problems when your car goes out of warranty because of their poor engineering.