Yeah, and this might have been mentioned here, but the GTR's warranty is voided if you turn the traction control off.... -kevin
We have a very nice, long argument about this in the GT-R thread. One which basically boils down to this: all warranty items are on a case-to-case basis. The guy who broke his GT-R did over 20 launches within the break-in period of the car (during this period, BMW, for example, will not even allow you to rev an M-engine past 4000 rpms), and Nissan didn't say "no" right away. They brought in two techs from Japan to pore over the gearbox and confirm, basically, that the guy was a hoonatic who abused his car.
If you troll through NAGTROC (the GT-R owners forum where this issue came up), you'll note that there are tuners who've got over 50 launches on their cars with nothing breaking... and the Russian dude whose broken gears are pasted all over the internet, did 70-100 Launch-Control Launches.
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I've done quite a bit of track time and I've seen how even untimed track sessions can cause suspension failures, overheats, oil starvation (and blown engines), brake failure and all sorts of nasty stuff. Even if you have a "high performance" car, things
will break.
The only difference between an untimed session and a timed session is that more people will shunt their cars in a timed session.
Thankfully, the worst I've ever experienced on the racetrack was a burned clutch, scored brakes, busted front ball-joint and boiling brake fluid and coolant... not a big deal at all.
Anyone who thinks the manufacturers have a responsibility to pay for the stuff they break while driving hard is either a trackday newbie or a selfish arse for asking other people to pay for their mistakes.
Even if it happens on the streets, if the damage is due to hard driving, manufacturers are not obliged to cover it. I know a guy who blew his engine because he was basically pinging off the rev-limiter in top gear on the highway. Not covered. The GT-R guy? Well, sucks to be you, man. I agree that the repair cost is steep, but if I were him, I wouldn't be trying to get it done under warranty!
The argument that if a company builds and advertises a high-performance car they should warranty its use in high-performance driving is weak. You don't get warranties on race cars or race engines, now, do you? The best warranty I've seen for race-engines is that they're guaranteed to run a few dozen hours before blowing up.
Now look at it this way. A high-performance
street car needs to meet exacting durability standards... it has to
not overheat at idle in traffic (trust me, that's very hard for a race-car to do), it has to survive a few thousand miles between oil changes (racecars, every race-weekend) and it has to go over 100,000 miles before needing a rebuild, if ever (race engines, from every few races to every season). That's a very demanding set of criteria for an engine that produces race-car amounts of power.
To ensure that you can give your customers this kind of coverage and reassurance that their cars will last this long, you make rules about what they can and can't do with their cars to expect this kind of coverage. They use markers to sort the wheat from the chaff... the legitimate warranty coverage issues from "it broke because he broke it". For Nissan, the ESC is just such a marker (but at least they investigated, first, before denying), for BMW, Launch Control use is also a marker. For most other automakers,
off-road use is the biggest marker of all.
If you're driving the car
on-road hard enough to break it, you're doing something illegal (burnouts, drag-racing and speeding are all illegal, right? Right?
), thus you have no case in court. If you're driving on the race track, that's automatically "off-road" and every manufacturer is within its rights to deny warranty on anything that happens there. It's harsh, but it keeps them from having to pay out to guys who abuse their cars wantonly, and this cost-saving is passed on to other owners of the same car, whose more mundane problems are actually covered by warranty.
