We have our second Nissan Patrol, having been very pleased with our first one which we had no problems at all with over several years. That was a Petrol engine vehicle. This is a diesel.
A week ago my wife was driving in the fast lane of a busy motorway, the M25, when there was, with no warning lights, a sudden complete loss of power, and grey smoke poured from the exhaust. Fortunately she managed to get the car to the hard shoulder without crashing. She had three young children on board. This could have caused a very serious accident. We are just lucky it didn't and that no-one was injured.
The vehicle was towed to a Nissan dealer who said this was very unusual, and that it would need a new engine. The car is 3 years and 2 months old, so just out of warranty. Searching on the internet we found that this catastophic failure of the Nissan Patrol diesel engine is not uncommon. They have been recalled in some countries, and apparently the engine has been redesigned to overcome this fault in newer models.
We contacted Nissan Motor GB who said they already knew about this problem as the dealer had contacted them, but we would not be covered by their "Goodwill" policy as the car was overdue for a service. This does not sound like goodwill to us. They acknowledged that this is a known problem to them, and said that they had recalled our car to fix the problem before we bought it - we had bought it a few months old directly from Nissan, as it had been a demonstration model. We had been told nothing of this when we bought the car from Nissan, and clearly their "fix" had not been sufficient.
They are taking no responsibility for a design problem in the Nissan Patrol Diesel engine which could easily have caused a fatal accident. We feel their comment about being overdue for a service is irrelevant. As the engine is a sealled system it should not have been short of oil. There had been a sudden catastophic loss of oil from the engine. No warning lights had come on - which could be another fault with the engine, although we understand that the engine failure probably happened so quickly that there would only have been a fraction of a second to respond.
Having my family's lives endangered by a Nissan design fault is bad enough. For Nissan to take no responsibility and not offer to replace the engine feels like a rip off.
David
Hawkhurst,
United Kingdom
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