Dealership Recommendations/Experiences

sylenze

Just to start it off,

Last week, my z died on me (luckily close by my house) and was unable to start. Got it towed to Fontana Nissan where it was eventually diagnosed that one of my cam sprockets needed replacement.

My issues with Fontana Nissan is two parts. First, the service adviser, Ric Del Rosario, essentially made me feel as an encumbrance and got annoyed at me when I tried to press for further analysis/diagnosis in regards to my car. Considering the issues I've had on my engine (short blocked replaced for oil consumption and upper oil pan leak), I was trying to understand or get further detail on what the root cause of the failure was. I was scared that the engine is still consuming oil and hoping that with all the issues I've had Nissan would replace the engine completely. Instead of trying to understand my concern, he simply insinuated that if there are any issues it would have been my fault. He started making statements like oil consumption was probably occurring because I use nissan esther oil, which he claims to be easily burned by the engine. He further insinuate blame towards me by saying oil consumption occurs when you ran your car hard or that perhaps when I changed the oil I didn't put enough oil in it.

With all of that, I started a claim with Nissan Consumer Affairs in hoping that my issues and concerns would get further attention. But, this would not be the case because NCA simply relies on the dealership to make technical judgement/recommendations on the car. And essentially, Fontana holds on to their initial and ostensible recommendation that the car doesn't need further evaluation because the only issue is the cam sprocket.

In any case, I got the car back last Saturday, and appeared to be running fine. Before exiting the dealership, I noticed that the car has develop an exhaust rattle. So, I immediately returned my car back to the service area to get it look at. The rattle comes in after reving the engine pass 3K rpms and specifically coming from inside the invidia gemini's resonator. During this whole time, Ric is essentially is not taking responsibility on the damage and making statements that they can't do anything about it since it's an aftermarket part. Although my car did get towed to the dealership dead and that the cam sprocket work would be away from the resonators, the rattle is so noticeable that I am confident that the damage occurred after it got to Fontana. Unfortunately, I did not log/take a picture of my mileage before my z got there, so I can't even prove if the car was taken out for extended "test drives" which I think would be the only possible cause of the resonator being damaged. We ended the issue with Ric talking to the Service Dept Manager to see if they can do anything, which I just found out did not happen after just calling and asking for Service Dept Manager directly.

Just to summarize, LOL, I would not recommend going to Fontana Nissan; and in the case that you have to, definitely either work directly with Paul Haley, the service director, or another service adviser.