While the concept of trim levels is great for reducing costs on popular items, cost-engineering can occasionally result in manufacturers making things options that probably shouldn’t be optional at such a great cost. Take the Nissan Z, for example. While the Performance trim adds a whole bunch of genuine performance goodies, it also quietly includes a glovebox part that you’ll never see but you’ll definitely notice.
It wasn’t that long ago that you could hop into any compact car, unlatch the glovebox, and have the door plummet open to the end of its stops like Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson in “The Other Guys,” but those days are largely behind us. Somewhere along the line, automakers decided to start using dampers to make opening glovebox doors seem more premium, and the effect’s remarkably satisfying. Cars with glovebox dampers are pretty normal now, but cars without them are cool too, if it fits the mission. On something rugged like the previous Jeep Wrangler, the lack of a glovebox damper fits its barebones nature. But what about cars with optional glovebox dampers?
If you find your way onto Nissan’s media site page for the Z, click on specs, and scroll down far enough, you’ll see an entry for, um, “Glove compartment dampening”. Specifically, the Performance trim has it, but the base Sport trim doesn’t. As it turns out, this isn’t a feature that turns your insurance card all soggy, but instead a damper that slows the opening of the glovebox.
It’s wild that this is optional on a car that starts at $44,110 including freight, and doubly so that it comes bundled into a $10,000 trim level jump. It’s like how Dodge bundles a front trunk and a glovebox light into a $4,995 option package on the Charger Daytona. The other stuff you get with the Z Performance trim is nice, like big brakes and a mechanical limited-slip differential, but packaging a glovebox damper that way just seems like cost-cutting.
Now, there’s something to be said about simplifying and adding lightness in a sports car, but there’s one big hesitation I’m having — the Nissan Z isn’t especially light. Since it rides on the same FM platform that came under a bunch of Infiniti sedans and crossovers, it weighs in at 3,486 pounds in base trim. A glovebox damper is gonna add what, less than a pound? Sure, it might add some cost too, but this is almost a $45,000 car. Customers probably won’t balk at paying a little bit more to get a glovebox damper.
Thankfully, there may be a way to fix this if you want a base Z but don’t want your glovebox to slam open like it’s straight out of Looney Tunes. According to Nissan’s parts catalog, the glovebox frame is shared between all Z trim levels, which means the glovebox damper itself should fit. Although a new-in-box example of part number 68513-1EA0A is currently on sale for $50.14 through Nissan’s parts portal, you might be able to get one even cheaper from a junkyard because this exact glovebox damper was shared with the 370Z.
So there we are, a potential solution to a problem that realistically, almost nobody will care about until they notice it. If Nissan would simply include a glovebox damper as standard, this wouldn’t be an issue, but here we are. If another similarly egregious example of cost-cutting on a car expensive enough that it should come with a feature as standard comes to mind, I’d love to hear it in the comments below.
Top graphic image: Nissan
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I’ve encountered this several times in my Prius v already.
Replace the turn signal stalk with the one from a higher trim with the fog light switch, and switch it on–fog light symbol on the dash comes on. (of course, more wiring had to be done under the hood, but still.)
Another fun thing was, the glovebox light was a tiny halogen. I replaced it with the Lexus CT200h equivalent part, which was a cool white LED. Then I found out the top-trim Prius v also had a footwell light for the driver, and I found a molded piece of the plastic holding the receptacle for the light…which was identical to the glove box light. Plugged it in and it just works.
This stuff is really frustrating from the consumer side. Gifting us everything but the important pieces.
I was all about getting one of these until I discovered it only weighs 200 lbs less than my 2010 Challenger R/T, which lists at 4,050 lbs.
Instead I kept the Challenger and got a 2008 Mazda RX-8 for when I’m feeling like driving a sports car. When I had my first RX-8 I was disconcerted by it sitting higher than my old RX-7s. Just yesterday, I pulled up next to a Toyota GT86 and found that I was sitting lower than the Toyota driver, and the beltline was lower, too. The Miata is probably the only non-exotic new car that sits as low or lower than the RX-8. Maybe the Corvette, too.
The article is wrong about the weight. The car weighs about 3,300 lbs. A truck stop scale confirms this.
As a person involved in designing helicopter lead lag dampers, it drives me crazy when people incorrectly call a damper, a dampener.
The Nissan part number correctly calls this a damper, the first paragraph of this article incorrectly says dampener. To dampen something is to make it wet. The correct term is to damp.
Nissan doing Nissan things. I think there is an internal metric at Nissan, where the higher trim needs x number of features more than the lower trim. I found Nissan doing this on the Ariya too, example: passenger side mirror tilting down on reverse, not available on the lowest trim. I don’t even think this requires hardware, but simply software coding. Just remove that coding and it now counts as a feature.