Originally Posted by ocfoilist

Unfortunately, the labor is not free. I got the same letter about 6 months ago and thought, OK $99 isn't too bad, so I called my dealer. They said that it would be about $250 for the labor. I was so thrown off by being told I would have to spend about $350 that I declined the offer.

I recently decided that I needed the update, purchased the code online, and brought it in to the dealer after scheduling an appointment to update to the 11-12 map set.

After bringing it in, the service tech tells me that they actually don't have the CD that installs the new maps yet and I would have to take the car back home. About a week later they call me and tell me that it's in and they can do the install for me. I schedule an appointment and tell them I will wait; they tell me that it will be about 90 minutes but that I should be prepared to pay for up to 2 hours of work for the mechanic. Between reading, I go out and check on the car every 20 minutes or so - nothing is being done. The car is not even on.

Finally, after 2 hours I go up to the desk and ask what is going on. They check with the tech and say that they haven't even started on it. A freaking SOFTWARE INSTALL! You plug in the downloading unit, push start, and come back whenever it's finished!

The guy looked sheepish and offered me a free rental for the remainder of the day. While I was waiting, one of the techs on his smoke break tells me that the last one they did took a long time. I asked him what, exactly, the professional mechanic does for the procedure besides push the download button. He told me nothing but he does need to check on the car from time to time to see when the download is complete. I asked him, since I was paying a large amount of money for this technician to do this work, if he exclusively sat in my car and babysat the procedure the whole time. The tech guy looked surprised and said no, they are doing other cars. So I asked him why they were effectively double-charging clients for their employee's hourly rate and that's about the time when he ran out of cigarette.

They finally called me that afternoon and "only" charged me $112 for the install. They said it actually took much longer but that they were sorry about not getting to the car right away and gave me a break.

The frustrating thing is that I like this dealer, the front service office people are good guys and they have taken care of my cars for almost 10 years now. They have never steered me wrong before so I tend to believe that it was simply Nissan's policy to create this bloated, overpriced installation process just to wring money from their customers. Given that they are simply loading new maps (probably under a single CD's worth), I can't believe the installation takes 2 hours to complete. Either someone is lying or Nissan intentionally engineered the process to be slow in order to increase service revenue.