After 5 years my Patrol looked like it was finally going back to visit Nissan for a fault.
Its been close several times, only 2 weeks ago it failed on a nasty ridge and wouldn't start but 2 hours of pain saw that the "Fault" was that a stick had speared up next to the transmission and ripped the linkages apart.
It was a critical time because NCIS was coming up on the TV, anyway we survived and I could hardly blame that one on Nissan !
But now another issue was becoming worse , you had to jiggle the ignition Key to get it to turn.
Many cars occasionally need the steering wheel to be given a shake to get the key to turn off lock but in my car the frequency was increasing such that almost every time I turned the key I would have to jiggle it for longer and longer.
So I took the car to Nissan who said its the locking mechanism in the steering wheel.
Its a high security box and the whole assembly has to be replaced as a unit.
On top of that we will have to replace every other lock in the car ( 6 of).
This is because the new unit has a different key.
That will be $1150 plus $120 for each key !
Wow, a sticky lock has become a $1500 dollar issue!
There seems to be little actual repair work done on some systems these days , service often comes down to replacing an entire subsystem !
Unhappy, I took the car round to a locksmith who does Nissan work and he said "Sad isn't it, but we know that item and we can re-machine the
actual sticky part, but it takes 5 hours labour to do it".
Well $500 is better than $1500, and I didn't like idea of someone playing with all the door trims, so next day I left the car at the locksmiths.
When I went to pick it up they said the fault had been diagnosed wrongly and the real issue was with the keys.
So $95 for the fix was much better than $1500.
All I can say is don't take the first response to a problem and in this day
of Box Swappers always try and get an opinion from someone who actually knows what they are talking about !