for people who are approaching a 20+% loss, what would you have Nissan do now?
1) replace the battery in anticipation of a linear loss based on what you have lost to this point? (iow, replace a tranny before it blows up because it does not "seem" to run right but still gets you down the road?)
wow, after rereading #1, any other point becomes useless. i think at this point Moderator, we need to suspend the thread until Feb 1st. by then we should have a handful of people with more than 20% loss.
now, all you Phoenicians may think i am being funny because i sit here with a measured 280 GID this morning but that is far from the truth.
we all have examples of companies that had known issues with a product that were not addressed simply because it was not convenient to do so. and ya!!
NEWSFLASH
companies do what is convenient to them, not u. even if Nissan knew there was a problem (and this has already been discussed, so nothing new here) their option is to
1) replace the pack now, before its really needed at a much higher expense taking from an already constrained supply
2) tell the customer that they will address the issue on Feb 1st because then the supply line will have extra packs from the TN plant (guessing they maybe tweaked a bit) where replacement will be MUCH cheaper for Nissan
now, why would they not tell us this now? i deal in customer service and patience and understanding is completely unheard of. a company cannot imply any future action without a shitstorm from the customer. in this day and age, every word out of place is magified a million times within minutes.
be it FB, Twitter, whatever, any controversy no matter how small will get out of control. so the corporate policy is say NOTHING.
now, is this the best policy? well to be honest with ya; yes it is.
in the grand scheme of things, it does not matter how quickly things get done, only the end result.
how many people stood in line to get Windows 98 (or whatever version if there was a version that did not have this) and install it only to find out they really could not browse until they downloaded about 50,000 security updates? great if you have high speed internet...(which i did not) sucks if you didnt and the download took 10 hours (true story) ok, MS realized this and said, oh we send u a disk. but that was not revealed until you actually bought the disk. would have been nice to have been able to order the disk ahead of time. so i downloaded the file and ordered the update disk which took a few weeks or more to arrive but MS did what they needed to do but at their convenience.
but if Nissan continues with this tact, by early 2013, the noise generated by people who have loss will be out there right at the same time that Leafs will actually be available to drive off in. (order sales % is like 20) impulse sales is like 50% so we want a Leaf in each color on the lot to pick from and drive off in. waiting for a car sucks... we all know that.
so, we have a bundle of grumps, who are finally addressed by Nissan who will no doubt do what they can to advertise that fact; grumps become happies, Nissan Cred jumps. they emphasize that 95% of the country has healthy battery pack without replacement and that they are offering $1000 rebates on 2013's...
so what the general public sees is Nissan bending over backwards to replace these packs that cost $20,000 (stay with me here!) all in the name of "standing behind their product"
when in reality, the packs are now US built and the cost is probably less than 25% of the packs being replaced. also keep in mind; most packs will probably only have a few modules replaced. now, we know better but do you honestly think the general public does?
there is a lot of ways to look at this situation and lets be realistic. Nissan knew what would happen, PERIOD
you all think Nissan is a crook, i personally think Nissan is in the middle of pulling off one of the greatest publicity stunts of all time