Dying K13 Auto

[Priory99]

I like Micras – I’ve had 4 and still own two- but current model seems to be a lemon.

I bought an auto K13 1.2l petrol version in Nov 2014 from Westway Nissan in Oxford. It was 18 months old (first registered 28/3/13) and had done 14k miles. It has now done 27k miles and been serviced once at my local garage.

For a while the car had been behaving strangely, it was unresponsive to the accelerator after stopping, especially after a longer journey – say 60 miles- and the problem seemed to be getting worse. This is my second car and mainly used by my wife for short local trips so I only noticed it when I used it recently for longer journeys – there were no warning notifications on the computer panel.


On 21/3/17 I took it back to Westway Nissan who advise that it needs a new auto gearbox. Engineer believed this was a Nissan manufacturing issue. He contacted them and Nissan have agreed to the supply of a new gearbox but will not pay the ca. £500 installation charge! I have spent 3 weeks arguing with Nissan Customer Services but they wont budge on this. They argue that if it had been serviced at a Nissan garage, they would have spotted ‘the belt slippage’ and the problem would have been rectified. And although its only done 13k miles in the 2 ¼ years I’ve owned it, it should have still been serviced every 12 months to meet the warranty requirements. I serviced it at 26k in Nov 2016 when the car told me to.

Is this a common problem with the K13 auto gear box? Should it have been spotted at routine service? They ran diagnostics but nothing showed up. Am I being unreasonable in expecting Nissan to fix it?

 

[SplanK]

To be honest, £500 for a brand new gear box fitted on a car well outside of the warranty window, and not being serviced in accordance to Nissan's schedule (12,500 miles or every 12 months, which ever comes first on a petrol these days) is getting away fairly lightly to be honest. I bet the gearbox before fitting itself is around £2000 if not more. Whilst not a nice situation to be in, I would be thankful Nissan entertained the idea of giving you a gearbox in this case...

HOWEVER....

Under the SOGA you have up to 6 years to 'prove' that a defect existed since day 1. After 6 months the burden of proof becomes your issue rather than the manuf.
In this case, your dealers engineer suggested a manufacturing defect and in some way Nissan agree with this by agreeing the installation of a new replacement gearbox. You could use this as 'proof' as such. You could try and push your rights for a fair service to yourself, but you may stumble on the issue of service, regardless of weather or not your dealers electronic scan showed any faults.

If you paid any part of the car on credit card, you have section 75 you can leverage (this will be however for a full refund of the car).

You need to weigh up the cost and the amount of time and stress you are willing to put yourself through on this. If it was me in this particular case, I would have a moan about it, but end up coughing up for the installation and putting it down to experience/lessen learnt about servicing and move on.

In addition, your sales contract is with your DEALER, not the manufacturer. It is the dealer you should be speaking with regarding this, and it is up to the dealer to discuss with the manufacturer.

The CVT gearboxes are not the best and I still don't really understand why Nissan want to keep doing down this route. They have been a source of issues one way or another for many years compared to fixed ratio auto's, from either belt slipping, software issues or premature failures.