Disappointing X-Trail Experiences

I have to say that I'm hugely disappointed with our Nissan X-Trail 2.5 Tekna 4x4 CVT 7-seater. We purchased it brand new in February 2018 from William Simpson in Tokai with a 6-year warranty and a 5-year service plan.

We chose Nissan because from 2*** we had owned the original X-Trail 2.0 2x4 and been very happy with it; I learned to drive in a Nissan, my parents owned several Nissan's in the 1990s & 2000s. The SIPS in a Micra my Dad once owned had saved his life when he got T-boned by another vehicle. Our previous experiences with Nissan had only been good.

When my wife and I were at the dealership we were vary careful to ask what we thought were all the right questions, particularly around the warranty and service plan: one of our closing comments was that with the warranty and service plan all our running costs were covered, with the obvious exceptions of fuel, insurance, license and tyres. The salesman and later the finance manager agreed. We couldn't have been happier.

18 months on and the vehicle has had it second service (30000km), I asked them to check the brakes at the service as I was experiencing some judder under heavy braking. I was called later in the day by the service manager who informed me that the front pads were wearing thin, they probably wouldn't make it to the next service and that they could replace them and skim the discs at a cost or R2400. I was a little alarmed: weren't the brakes covered by the plan? No, we had a service plan, not a maintenance plan. Okay, by the warranty? No the warranty doesn't cover wear and tear. Then how were all our running costs covered? I'm not accusing anyone of knowingly mis-selling, but our questions at purchase around the warranty and service plan weren't answered completely. I didn't have a spare R2400 at the time so told William Simpson to finish the service and I'll sort the brakes at a later date.

We're a couple of thousand kms past the service and low and behold there's an occasional nasty metal on metal sound coming from the front. I'm going to have to find that money to have the brakes done, but I'm still not happy that this is not covered by the service plan or the warranty and that this wasn't disclosed when we were purchasing.

This leads me on to the next part of my complaint, which is more about the car in general. For years I used to do my own car maintenance, but now I don't have the time and cars have become much more complex so I let the professionals do it. From experience, however, and a little google-fu, I know that modern brake pads should go for any where between 30 & 70 thousand kms. How come my top of the line (according to the salesman) 2018 X-Trail was fitted with pads that wear out in the bottom of that range?

Either the X-Trail has poor quality brakes or it's heavy on them. It's also heavy on fuel: the figures claim 8.3l/100km. We average around 12l/100km. My average daily commute is a 40km round trip, in and out of Southern Suburbs / Cape Town traffic: I usually get around 14-15l/km for that trip. If we do a long trip (we have been to Jo'berg and back in it) we might get it nearer 8l/100km; but there's no way that the combined figures will ever get that low. On average it's worse than the Land Rover Freelander II 2.2 TD4 that we traded in for the X-Trail, after 10 years we were still getting between 10 & 11 l/100km in that.

After 18 months of motoring I have lots of other niggles with the car (the CVT gearbox, the semi-automatic parking brake, and more) but I'm not going to details about that.

Overall this has been a disheartening experience for my wife and myself: we've already decided that once we have some equity in the car we're going to get rid of it, and in all likelihood we won't be purchasing another Nissan. Or recommending that anyone else should purchase one.