The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other related organizations have been receiving complaints from Nissan truck owners about their transmissions failing and troubles with Nissan issuing a recall.

The affected owners said that they’ve spent thousands of dollars on transmission repairs because of a faulty radiator that could leak into the transmission fluid, causing the transmission to fail. Nissan apparently offered owners the option for an extended warranty on the radiators, but the coverage was only available for trucks with less than 80,000 miles. And this has caused uproar.

“There is a ‘huge’ problem with the five-speed automatic in the aforementioned Pathfinders, Frontiers and Xterras,” said Lance Wiggins, technical director for the Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association. “This is a total failure of the cooler portion of the radiator that is responsible for the cooling of the transmission.” Wiggins added that he has seen failures as early as 60,000 miles.

“The issue here is that Nissan knew that they had a faulty radiator and instead of recalling the radiator they extended the warranty knowing that the majority of the cars would surpass 80,000 miles before they started having problems with the transmission,” said Eva Saldivar, an owner of a 2005 Pathfinder with 115,000 that required the transmission to have $6,000 worth of repairs.

Nissan’s extended warranty said that the company will reimburse owners who’ve had the repair completed, however the offer expired on July 31st and despite that, Nissan said if your truck has less than 80,000 miles or is less than eight years old, you could still have the repair done for free. However, many owners went about without knowledge of this fault, thus leading them to transmission failure.

- By: Chris Chin

Source: NYT