I know this issue has been beaten to death, but I just ordered my car (04 SS Enthusiast 6MT) and am curious. First I would just like to point out that I asked my salesman if he had seen any bad trannys out of any of the Zs he has sold. Now I realize this is probably a waste of time because he just wants to sell a car. But he told me that he hasn't seen a single bad tranny yet come through this particular dealer. I asked him if the dealer has replaced one tranny yet. He said no. So this was somewhat reassuring to me. He also went on to say that "the people" on these boards are only the ones who have problems. I had to laugh, but he brings up an interesting point.
It is more likely that you will seek out a board like this if you have a problem, than not in my opinion. So I was just wondering if anyone had numbers as far as the percentage of trannys that were bad. I am told there are 30,000+ Zs on the road now, so I am really curious. For example if there are 30,000 Zs out there and say, 100 people have problems. Say 25 of them post on this board. That really isn't as bad as it would seem otherwise. Sorry for the long post, but I really am curious about numbers if anyone has them. By the way, I am expecting my Z by Dec. 1, and I am already counting days...........

 

I got the same comment from the service tech at my dealership today. I proceeded to hand over the half inch thick printout of all the people who have had tranny replacements. If you buy that argument, you are falling into his web. You could argue just as well that look at the pages and pages of people who have 350z's and who are on this forum (trust me, the people on this forum are probably 1/5th of the owners, at best, and that only reason I say that high is because it is a more young persons car, ie more tech saavy, etc). On top of that, there are the people who have seen and posted on that stickied thread. On top fo that there are the people who are not regular posters and might never see the post, or this repairing forum.

They didn't know about the 3rd part number tranny at my dealership, but he did say that he had noticed it had two preceding part numbers, and wondered why. He said that the reason for that was usually when they changed to another vendor that was a subcontractor for various parts. He said it didn't make sense because he knew that Nissan made the tranny's themselves, so now he knew why he saw the different old part numbers.

Anyhow, all that said, don't sweat it, if you have problems, it will be fixed. It sounds like this 3rd part number tranny does the trick though, so yours should definitely be built with this one in place already, so you should be safe.