On my new-to-me 2016 Rogue with leather seats, the second row RH seat reclining lever cable seems to come undone or to have broken. The factory manual for getting into the seat shows a rather extensive process of disassembly. Has anyone had to replace their reclining cable and have any experience with abbreviating the process from what is shown in the factory service manual? (I could not find any videos on the web for this).

Thanks!

Those seat backs are buggers and there are no real short cuts if the cable is broken. If you do need to disassemble the seat back, have a handful of the white clips for the seatback board on hand, they always break. P/n for those is 88746-6FU0A.

Most of the time the problem will be a broken lever and not a broken cable, and you can usually fish the cable out and replace the lever without disassembling the seat back. That isn't difficult, but for some reason the "dissassembly" section in the FSM doesn't tell you there's only one screw holding the lever and escutcheon to the frame. It's hiding under the lever and you can see it in the exploded drawing if you look close. See SE-64 here, it's the un-numbered fastener shown with item #33:
https://www.nicoclub.com/service-manual ... 6%2FSE.pdf

If the lever is broken, then the cable-end may be deep down in the hole. If so, you'll need a good fishing tool like a long hemostat to get it out. Magnets don't work, the pivot ends on the cables are white-metal.

That's very helpful. I had seen that the handle is held in with one screw as you mentioned. I was hoping I could just start there and see what I see... Thanks for confirming that.

You're most welcome. Busted levers on gen2 Rogues are a common problem. Post some pics of what you find and fix, I'm sure it will help others.

I did finally fix it. I wanted to wait until I had some extra clips on hand first. Turns out the lever was not broken. Instead the cable seems a little long and the ball at the bottom end was coming unhooked. I squeezed the flange together just a bit to make it harder to the cable to pop out and it now stays in place just fine.

Sweet. Glad you got it fixed, happy motoring!