Adventures with NissanConnect

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Joined
Jan 28, 2024
Messages
74
Location
the dark heart of Iowa
I realize the topic has been beat to death here and on other forums, but am starting this thread just to document my own experience with a loss of NissanConnect services and efforts to get them back.

NC started working for me soon after I bought the car used back in February of this year. The app is definitely buggy and clunky in some ways, but it did a good job with the main things I wanted it for: showing me the state of charge, allowing me to start a charge when it was plugged in but not charging, locking the doors if I was worried that I'd forgotten after parking, turning on climate control remotely. All useful features.

In August I got the email saying my trial subscription was about to end and I was going to lose "premium" services. It wasn't clear to me from the mail whether the services I actually used were going to be lost, so I let it lapse, figuring I could decide later whether I needed that premium subscription.

The expiration date came and went, and I lost none of those services listed above. The app said my "select" subscription was good until February 2027. So I forgot about it.

Then two months later (about 8 months after purchase) all NC functions stopped working. I thought it was another temporary outage. But it has stayed broken for over three weeks. I eventually called Nissan customer service and was informed that it was because of the initial trial expiring, and that the "select" service doesn't do much except lock and unlock your doors. There was an offer for a year of premium for $99.90, would I like that? Hmm, it works out to 27 cents a day or so. Sure.

I ponied up the cash and was told it should start working within 24 hours.

Switching to present tense. 48 hours later, it hasn't started to work. Of course the difference is that now I'm actually paying for it to not work, which kinda matters. I call them back today and a guy confirms that everything in my account is correct, my payment was approved, but their system says the "provisioning" failed. He asks me to go out to the car, turn it on, and press the SOS button in the overhead console. What color does it light up, green or red? In fact, it doesn't light up at all. He puts me on a lengthy hold. I go inside and make some coffee.

He picks up the phone and tells me they're going to re-do the provisioning step and I should give it another 24 hours before calling back. My instinct tells me I'm basically just being put off for a day: if it failed the first time, and there's been no indication of a problem being corrected, why should we expect it to succeed the second? Come to that, why does it take 24 hours to complete what should amount to a database access and a couple of bursts of electronic communications between their server and my car?

So my technical BS meter is ticking over into the yellow zone. I'm not upset yet, just starting to wonder if I'm in for a lengthy and pointless ordeal of one misdiagnosis after another, which may or may not actually result in NC service being restored.


Other details that may or may not mean anything to forum members:

1. On the map screen, the car icon in the upper right corner does not have a line through it. It has a beaming satellite symbol above it. I take it to mean that the antenna is switched on and communicating.

2. Whether it matters or not here, the car is also able to receive SiriusXM radio.

3. Before making the first support call (I think), In the infotainment settings, I had found and gone through the approval step for transmission of vehicle information just to make sure that wasn't the hangup.

4. Here's what I should have checked on before making that $100 payment: the app can't actually lock or unlock the car doors. If that's supposed to be part of the "select" subscription that continues for three years, then what the first customer service rep told me may still have been true about needing to resubscribe, but I still should have known there was something else wrong.


I'll follow up here tomorrow. Maybe everything will start working by then. I give it, as Captain Marko Ramius said, one chance in three.

(edited to remove an irrelevancy or two)
 
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Late yesterday an email arrived asking me to try the SOS button again, so I did. It was dark out, and I could see that the button does indeed glow a faint red. But the button still does nothing, and the phone app doesn't work.

After another phone conversation with another polite support person at Nissan, the case has been "escalated."
 
My app on android has been pretty stable until yesterday with the change from "daylight savings time". It always takes a repeat refresh to get the current charge status screen to update, but today it couldn't get the day or time correct. Oddly, the charge timer screen was spot on. Stupid app sometimes.
 
In this case I actually wondered if the problem was that they were trying to connect to the wrong car! I had briefly had a different Leaf and exchanged it within a few days for this one, and I recently got the rear camera notice with the wrong VIN, which made me suspicious. But yesterday they fixed up their records over the phone, we agreed on the right VIN during that same conversation, and they're still not getting communication between their servers and the car.

I hope they can figure this out once the dealer has it. If not, there'll be a limit to how much time and money I'm willing to pour into a resolution, but no point jumping to any conclusions yet.
 
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