I tried to charge my phone through my car for the first time today. I noticed that if my car isn't turned on, it won't work. Is that normal? Anything I can do? WIth my previous car (BMW 3series), I could leave my phone on the car charger, and it would work.

It's normal. I don't know what can be done about it.

I seem to remember a post about this topic about 2 weeks ago, talking about certain outlets are made for charing and certain ones only for actual cigarette lighting...

Maybe the accessory will only charge when the car is on?

I tried both the cigarette lighter and the accessory adapter. Neither works without the ignition being on.

Thanx!

This is just the way that Nissan designed the car.

If you wanted to change it, you'd have to re-wire the source of the +12V to the socket from ACC to the battery or some other constant +12 source. The radio is a good place, as I believe it gets some constant +12V for its memory.

I was looking for the same fix. My buddy's Mustang GT does this and I was pretty jealous my Infiniti couldn't do the same.

nissan designed it so you dont accidentally leave something plugged in and drain the battery. If you want to reverse engineer it, you will need to re-wire it like thoraxe said.

Why would you want it any other way??????

I would say 90% of the time this rule applies:
Foreign: Accessory only power (key in, turned to ACC)
Domestic/Euro: constant 12v power. (no key, power)

Rewiring is easy as pie, by the way.

when i was hard wiring my V1 i noticed that the red wire with the black stripe is a constant "always on" 12volt source (dont want the V1 to be always on when the car is off)... so just rewire your 12volt outlet with that wire and you will be in business...

this will be my next project as i too am annoyed by the lack of an always on power source for my phone...

I'm not sure I trust mine anymore. A few weeks back, when I tried to pull a charger out of mine, it didn't want to come. Then the whole thing came out. I pushed it back in, but now I don't trust it will stay, and that I didn't do some damage.

I guess I'll have it looked at when I take it in for the 60K service.

yea my charger fits in there pretty snug. Never pulled the entire socket out though. As for constant power source in my G, ehh really don't care. Can't think of anytime i would leave my phone in my car and it being beneficial to me.

Thats how my old mitsubishi was and my buddies subby wouldn't charge with the car off. A lot of the domestic cars will work with the car off.