A 370z Horror Story

FernDiggidy

With all the good info on this forum about modding, thought I'd share the awful experience I've had with mine.

TL DR: at 30k miles (had my car for 3 years - bought it brand new), my ecu got fried and my transmission began to chew through gears. I no longer have my baby and I miss her dearly.

I began modifying my car last year in March. The start of my joyful journey (or so I thought) took place with the purchase of stillen cold air intakes ($400+). I got the intakes installed by a local shop for about $200. After the installation, my car felt fierce. A nice, deep growl could be heard coming from the engine bay and the perceived HP gains were felt. This feeling of modding euphoria sent me down the rabbit hole that I am in today.
My next purchase went on to be the armytrix exhaust system which ran me a whopping $3,100. Installation ran me about $250. Although steep for an exhaust system - I'll admit - the sound of my car transformed completely. This added excitement to my already gleeful attitude about further modifying my car.

My next steps to building the perfect N/A car (for me at least) were underway.

I decided to buy a set of Fast Intentions High flow Cats ($510), a Z1 upper intake manifold mod ($235), and a pair of stillen headers ($587). I was so pumped when I finally received all these parts that I immediate took them to Motion lab tuning in Charlotte NC to get them installed. This cost me $800 in total.

The parts began to get installed and as my excitement grew, I got a call from motion labs telling me that the threads on my driver side A/F sensor had been chewed so badly that it could not be screwed back on. Little did I know that from this point forward my car would began to give me the litany of problems that I have today.

I replaced the A/F sensor ($200) - which by the way, took motion labs about an extra 5 days to find the correct one -___-. After this minor bump in the road (or so I thought) ended I took my "brand new" car and experienced the thrill of modding. I could feel and hear the difference in power. I was so excited that I wanted to get a tune immediately. Everyone said this would be the next step in the process. So I made preparations for this. Until........I began hearing some weird rattling coming from the newly installed HFCs. In trying to find out where that noise was coming from, I made a turn into the gas station and noticed that my steering wheel (only when turning to the right) would impact with something. Turns out, the steering shaft was slamming into the newly installed headers and the catalytic converter in one of the HFCs came loose which was causing the rattling.

Days later, the passenger side HFC blew on me. It came off clean from the weld. I must have hit the car on something, because the bottom of that cat, had a minor scratch on it.

Stillen was kind enough to warranty out my driver side pipe after I informed them of my turning issue. Fast intentions was kind enough to repair the driver side HFC due to the rattling but charged me for the labor to fix the blown passenger side cat. I wasn't mad about that, I understood the situation and I was ultimately at their mercy. After receiving the parts back, I had to get them reinstalled. This cost me about $800 due to the re-installation of the parts and because I had to put my stock cats back on in order to have a functioning car while the HFCs were getting fixed. The re-installation fixed the HFC issue but the steering shaft was still grazing the driver side headers. I doubt that Stillen gave me two bad parts back to back so I just chalked it up to motion lab's inability to install headers properly. I think it’s safe to say they did a PISS POOR on installing my build. So, they shaved off some of the bolt on the steering shaft to alleviate the issue.

2 months after that, my car had been driving great so I decided to get it tuned since I was running lean, wanted to get the annoying engine light turned off and wanted to check off the last piece for my dream N/A Build.

I took my car to soho 3 weeks ago and noticed that I had yet another exhaust leak. Turned out that my Y pipe had a crack in it all the way around (which I later got welded back together at Midas for $90, and surprisingly, they did a great job). Through finding out this crack soho also saw that my differential bushing went out. I panicked then quickly realized this would be covered under my warranty (and it was thankfully which saved me $1700).

After my tune ($800), my car put out record numbers. You can go to the tuning section to see them. Soho was able to achieve a massive 339 AT THE WHEELS on my build. I was ecstatic. The throttle response was phenomenal. I felt like I legitimately had a new car that was in a league of its own. I had no Idea this much power could be produced without forced induction. After all, I was a noob (and still am) when It came to any of these parts and what they could potentially do.

Suddenly, this rush of pure euphoria came crashing down once my car began to stall..........only a WEEK after the tune. Soho tried to do everything possible to diagnose the problem; we even took most of the parts off, went back to stock and reset the ECU to factory standards. Nothing! Car was still stalling randomly. Soho then checked the transmission fluid. It was black, and full of metal flakes. My transmission had failed..............How could this have happened? My car only had 30k miles on it. Sure I always drove in sport mode, but I thought these transmissions could handle daily driving in that mode. Days passed, and still no answer as to what caused this colossal failure in my car so I took my chances with Nissan to see what they could do and see if they could repair my issues under warranty.

They checked the ECU, and saw that it was tampered with. Soho told me that by putting the factory tune back on that Nissan would have never known that the car's computer had ecutek on it before. And they were right, to some extent. They couldn't see that ecutek was put in, but they also couldn't locate my serial numbers and the logs they pulled off the car suggested that the computer had been modified at some point. My warranty went out the window. I was now looking at a cost of $2100 to get a new ECU installed and begin diagnostics. Once that was finished and they would go to the next steps and potentially would have saw that my transmission was toast. I’m sure that at that point they would have blamed the transmission failure on my ECU, therefore rendering my warranty useless. I was looking at a potential cost of 7k to get a new tranny installed. As you could imagine, I was at a point of no return. But luckily, I was able to get out of these huge repairs by getting into a new 370z FML!!!!

My horror story ends there.

If you guys would lend me your wisdom and shed light on what you think went horribly wrong, that would be greatly appreciated. It could potentially help me prevent this disaster from ever happening on the new Z I got today if I do decide to mod it in the future (as of now, FVCK NO!!!! never!!!!!). Or maybe it's the way I drive my Z. I do so aggressively and enjoy the control I have over it in sport mode. I didn’t think that driving like that constantly would deteriorate the life of my tranny so early on.

Although I was able to crawl out of this emotional abyss and got into a brand new 370z, I'm numb inside knowing that I spent close to $8,000 only to destroy my car. I play the stock market a LOT! and I've never taken a loss this bad. The negative equity due to the massive failures is now bundled into my new monthly payments. Worst feeling ever....My girlfriend could break up with me right now and it would not begin to touch the turmoil I'm experiencing, LOL. You live and you learn, and I guess it pays to play.

Apologies for the essay and potential grammatical errors. I just wanted to make this horrendous experience that I've had this past year, as vivid as possible.

All in all, good luck to you all and avoid road bumps as much as you can!


Cheers mates! Happy modding.

fire165

I read the first paragraph. Then I stopped.

Spooler

If you modify your car it can happen. It is just part of the game. It's fun but when things go wrong it is not perty. It can become a money pit. This is why I don't do auto's when moding. They just can't take it. I will deal with CSC issues all day long before an auto tranny issue.

jaedub

I'm very conservative when it comes to modding.....meaning no turbos or touching the engine/ECU components. The more you mod your car, the more problems you'll have later down the line. This is a fact. To play in the safe side, I only modded my exhaust, intake, wheels, and exterior parts. I will probably go for bigger brakes, suspensions, cooler, shaving weight, etc. But again, I refuse to touch something that can make my Z croak.

Judging by your diff bushing shot, I can tell that you have a heavy foot. While the Z can taking a beating, driving erratically will only shorten the lifespan of ANY car. If you do push your car to its limit, maintain your car frequently by changing all the oils and keeping an eye out for wear and tear.

gurneyeagle

I feel your pain. As much fun as it was to mod/personalize my Z, almost every mod created a problem that needed to be fixed.

Some of the pain was due to poor installation, but some was just from being naïve enough to think that everything fit/worked like OEM.

__________________
Waiting on the Z35! SOLD - 2011 Gun Metallic Touring 7AT w Sports Pkg & Nav, Nismo Bumper and Rims, RC Grille, RC Brake Ducts, H&R Spacers, Painted Door Hdls, GTR Start Button, Nav By-Pass, EVO R Fog Light, CF Ducktail, CF Interior Trim

jchammond

If your's is an A7,,,gotta keep that fluid clean & around 180*
Flushed mine very well at 50k without any mods/except drop-in K&N's.
After seeing it look like coffee/but not burn't smelling-i knew i waited too long.
since the 50k flush (12'ish qts.) i do a drain & fill every 5k (around 4.5qts. on level ground)...fluid stay's clean & i actually notice it shifting better/quicker with each service.
about to hit 80k soon & love my A7,,,,if it ever goes out....it's going to Pat@levelten in New Jersey.

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Nithmo

A couple things come to mind:

1. You should start buying tools and wrench on your car yourself. There is things I suggest you don't do yourself until you know a bit more about cars, but installing stuff like an air intake is easy peasy and should not cost 200 bones to do so. Also, if you do the work yourself and you take your time, you'll know it was done right. That is the biggest reason to start turning wrenches.

2. You modded an auto transmission and it subsequently died. I'm not surprised. In my experience, a car that comes in auto and manual trims, the auto will be much weaker in comparison to the manual. Look at the old NSX- the manual pushed 290hp but honda kept the auto at 270hp. The auto transmission was purposely kept with lower power so as to not kill the tranny. I can think of a handful of other examples where the auto was never as strong as the manual.

3. Sounds like you suffered a series of unfortunate events with your first Z. Most were minor, right until the end. No idea why your o2 sensor was chewed up- I feel like it was the shop that butchered it. Once again, a reason to do work yourself!

Xhilr8n!

I have a teenage son who is beginning this road. Ignorance of youth. No matter what I say he reads stuff all over the internet and believes it will work.

Sure I've modded the heck out of cars, even to the point that they were unstreetable and I had a trailer and tow vehicle before she could move at all.

But NOT my daily driver. Only something that could spend time on jack stands between track weekends. And I was financially prepared to replace transmissions and consider rotors and splitters as comsumables.

And remember, every mod lowers the vehicle's value by as much as you just spent.

You don't keep the car forever. Have the exit in mind.

__________________
Lotus: 1974 Europa, 2005 track Elise, 2011 Evora S
DD: 2015 Honda Civic Si, Toyota Tundra TRD PRO
2007 350Z, 2010 370Z 40th, 2016 370Z Nismo, should read XZILR8N!

37zeroZ

Reading comprehension can be difficult.

Redglare

do you still own all the cars in your sig?

Trips

Wow!!

Sorry to hear of all the issues.

Hopefully you'll have better luck second time around

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Jayhovah

Honestly I'd chalk a lot of this up to bad luck... but would echo what Nithmo said - learn to do work yourself, and be meticulous. Not only can you be certain that the job is done properly, you'll also be more vigilant for potential problems (like steering shafts making contact with headers!!!!).

The other option is to only take you car to top tier Z shops and pay the price that comes with that - which you will usually find is mostly competitive with the chop shops most people go to and they will warrant their work to boot. The real problem is finding one since there seem to be so few around the country that are well known for work with our cars and actually take care of their customers... I lucked out when I did my TT kit as I did my install in Houston so I could take it to get tuned at JTRAN. I honestly don't know who I would trust here in Tampa.

All that being said... I think you had some bad luck. Your mods are pretty common.

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2013 Gun Metallic Sport - Gamma V3 Twin Turbogized
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Xhilr8n!

The sweet Evora S is in Cali. Nice fellow offered a good price and I let her go after four fine years. The Z is filling some of the void. We'll see what the future holds. I'd like an Aston some day.

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Lotus: 1974 Europa, 2005 track Elise, 2011 Evora S
DD: 2015 Honda Civic Si, Toyota Tundra TRD PRO
2007 350Z, 2010 370Z 40th, 2016 370Z Nismo, should read XZILR8N!

OptionZero

1) if ur gonna modify your car, have a second car. No replacement for a replacement. I sleep easier knowing my Z is weekend only and i have a stock sedan for daily. Bottom line, if you cant go to work, you cant pay for your crap

2) you bought an automatic sports car, upped the power, and drove it like crap. Learn how to drive stick, learn how to live

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OptionZero Build Thread

Ventruck

I'm sure OP is getting the feel that we're kinda talking him down, and I'm pretty sure that's no one's intention really, but to add:

I personally think the real takeaway from this is careful judgement and foresight. You did your research on what parts to buy; not sure how meticulous you were with troubleshooting, anticipating issues, and how to go forward with each move vs. simply getting them installed.

You literally drove with multiple breather mods and no tune for months, and by 2014 I'm pretty sure there was a sleuth of posts regarding automatic transmissions and this car you could've read up on.

This whole account reads like you were in a candy shop filing your bag (car) as you please. It's not even necessary to list the price tag of everything. I'm wondering how much coordination was done between Motion Labs and Stillen to sort out the HFC issue before accepting the idea of shaving the steering shaft bolt. I would not have proceeded at all until that was actually understood.

The ECU warranty issue is also something you should've anticipated the very moment you went for EcuTek. "Warranty" and "ECU" are such key terms that go together.

I'm sorry, but it's true. I can buy into the idea that one can have supercharged daily and be perfectly fine, but it boils down to proper precaution and planning. There is some misfortune, but this could've been approached more carefully with what sounds like better driving to go with it. With the amount you spent, and desire to have a faster, louder car, you probably were on your way to a Corvette.