If you've been in the market for a new compact SUV, you probably know the story of the 2013 Ford Escape: Four recalls in the first six months, including one that urged owners to stop driving their new vehicle due to fire risk. Ford doesn't seem to know the cause of the problems involved with the latest recall, and is having customers contact dealers to get loaner vehicles while they figure things out.
Now consider this message from Nikon to a D800 owner this week (I've now collected several such Nikon responses along the same lines): "we are forwarding your images to Japan for further review. We are recommending that you do not send your D800 in for service. We are recommending for the time being that you use center or right focus."
I have lots of problems with this still being the case so many months after the camera first shipped.
First, let's deal with that "use center or right focus" statement. What Nikon actually means is use Single Point AF with center or right sensors only. You can't use Auto Area, 3D, or even most Dynamic Area methods without the left sensors being involved and possibly causing out of focus images. In other words, much of the focus system is off limits for users following Nikon's instructions.
Note that Ford is at least trying to do the right thing by customers by lending them functional vehicles while trying to figure out what the engine problems really are. True, fire in a vehicle is a real safety issue while lack of good focus in a camera is just a nuisance. Still, we're talking about customers that paid a heck of a lot of money for a top-line camera here: they expect top-line support and instead they're getting "just use the parts of the camera that work" messages from Nikon.
I also have to wonder just how effective sending test images to Japan is in detecting what a camera's real problem is. Essentially you have a well-trained and equipped subsidiary saying "we don't know what the problem is, so it'll have to checked by the factory." So why not just send the actual camera to Japan and give the owner a loaner or replacement in the mean time? Oh, right, cost. So are we now to assume that high-end Nikon products get low level customer support?
I first reported focus issues on some D800 models back in May, then elaborated at length in June and July. Here we are at the end of the year and Nikon is still responding to some D800 customers just now discovering those problems with "we don't know what the problem with your camera is." That alone is disconcerting, but there doesn't seem to be a strong enough urgency on Nikon's part to close this problem down.
The answer to the question in the headline is "no, Ford at least seems to be trying to do the right thing." Heck, they responded after only 13 reports of problems in the latest recall.
Lest people get the notion that this is a backtrack on my previous message about the D800 focus situation, please note that we still have a lot of early purchasers just now discovering the camera they bought some time ago has a problem and corresponding with Nikon about what to do about it. It's the customer support response that's in question here, not the quality of currently shipping cameras.