Can I Have My Money Back?

Didn't the "restructuring" also abdicate GM from other previous warranty work on othe late models? I thought at the New GM did not have to take on "old" GM's problems or warranties?

Regardless, GM may think they have won, but this was a marketing decision and future sales are lost for sure.  This was not a Cobalt, Cavalier, or a Cruze, this is supposedly a very nice car, and many would say an Elite class car.  

I never did understand all the rebadging of platforms at GM, nor at Ford with Mercury and Ford with similar models on the same platforms. Of course there were people who would swear their Pontiac was better than a Buick or that a Marquis was better than a Crown Vic. 

You would think by now that we could make compressors, alternators, water pumps that should easily last 150,000.  Yet, no, because we have to reengineer them, to improve them, to do what...fail sooner?  That is what they do.  Did we really need plastic radiators?  

I now have issues with the struts on my Saturn Vue from 2003, which has been a great car with a 5 speed/4cy getting 30 on the hiway @ 113K miles. I had a wheel bearing go at 60K that they fixed. That's it. I've replaced the struts once a month ago and they squeak like an old mattress in a brothel. New ones for free to exhange out are coming Fed Ex.  We'll see. Of course now, Saturn and Pontiac are history. Two affordable car lines gotten rid of in a down economy...that makes sense. NOT!  I will not buy a Chevy to replace my Vue. 

Usually new and improved only means "we've found a new way to make it for less". I've been told these struts area new design.  

What we have fogotten in all of this is that if we only treated each other like we would like to be treated, none of this would go on. Power does corrupt and it is why the rest of the world is eating our lunch in manufacturing. 

Is there anybody at the top of GM who deserves to make even close to $1 mil?  NO!!!!

Maybe someone will put their thknking hat on with your issue. What ever that compressor cost GM is way less than what profit they have made on you in buying a new car.  Even little old me gets that. 

Read the Magnusson-Moss warranty act, then take the bastards to small claims court. When have you ever let anyone off so easily Mikey?

I hope you can find a solution that is not out of your pocket. They should replace it, but they could install one you buy and that would save some money. Keep us posted. Curious as to what GM does.

Hi Mike,

You need to talk the Regional Manager for Warranty Service.  He works for GM and not the dealer.  The warranty is close enough that they should cover it.  However I would not tell him/her that you would never buy a GM car again.  You will be losing your leverage. Other leverage you can bring is this Blog, but do it carefully.  Tell them that you would consider any car with advanaced technology, and BTW the Chevy Volt actually has very advanced technology.  The compressor is most likely not a Saab product, but made by a component manufacturer.  Could be German (Bosch) or even American (GM).  I had a Saturn LW300 and the brakes were the same as certain Saab models and certain Suburu models (all owned by GM until recently).  It will not cost them $2,000 to accomplish this task.  More like $800.00 with their cost on parts and they also have negotiated labor rates with the Dealer.

Good Luck, 

Hook it up to a 12 volt motor, and put a coolant tube in and a coolant tube out and press the big red button?  Does the test liquid flow? Check.  Do the bearings chatter too much?  Check.  

Doesn't seem hard at all.  

Silly response.

As to the GM bailout being successful, that's for a whole other discussion.  GM isn't doing very well at all.  All the taxpayer did, unlike the bank bailouts, was delay the misery of failure a few more election cycles past when America's political ADD will remember what bad shape they were in in the first place.  I'm not opposed to occasional government intervention/regulation because there is no such thing as "perfect" libertarianism/classical liberalism.  And as is often noted by liberal defenders of Bush (don't hear that every day, do you)  only about half the TARP money ever had to be spent.  Turns out, when they saw the strings attatched to money, the banks were in better shape than they realized, and took less than the government set aside to give them, and the government will come out ahead on the deal, and billions of dollars of property value have been saved.  And as a small aside, owners of any property can now find out who actually owns their loan with out a silly amount of work - because all you have to do is ask.  They've always had to tell you, eventually.  But they nearly couldn't - because they had to bundle AAA loans with probably defaults to rate the sucurity a notch above junk.  Try that 6 years ago.

Anyway, as a fairly devout libertarian, and Bush/Obama detractor, most government "rescue" programs actually end up doing pretty well.  Because as it turns out, the same people who get us into messes actually ARE usually the most qualified to get us out, as silly as it seems on the surface.

..... if I ever heard one. If you had done one-tenth the due diligence in your car purchase as you do in selecting your audio gear you would have know never to buy a Saab and never, ever buy a GM product to begin with!

........ to account for taste, Mikey. I won't even begin to state my thoughts on the autos that you've mentioned. Not even worth debating. Besides, this is your house and I won't come in only to shit on your carpet. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

Cheers,

SB

I wish I could vent and post my petition against MetLife not paying me my disability insurance benefits but I won't bother on here.

I say get a Lexus.  MY last one had 300,000 miles on it and someone is still driving the damn thing..

Again, Love the site!

Mike Fremer I enjoy reading your writing!  Didn't Romney like reorganization under bankruptcy for GM rather than a bailout, sort of like the airlines.

Regardless of anyones politics I'm always amazed with people who are able to see into some alternate universe and tell what would have happened if something else had been done.

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I bought my car from Chevy dealer Tucson and I don`t regret my decision, Chevrolet manufactures the best cars and I won`t buy anything except Chevy. My son`s car broke and he managed to call the specialists from GM, he was lucky because he had one more week of warranty, if the engine showed problems a little bit later he also would have to repair the car by himself.

Mike, I had a similar experience with Ford (albeit far worse, to where I almost considered a lawsuit), and have been stranded in too many GMs in my lifetime to ever go down the Big Three road again.  They could "improve" (quotes intentional) their product all they want, but their service after the sale and general attitude toward customers has still not changed over the decades.  We have two cars in the household fleet now that have almost 450,000 miles between the two of them; the older one with 256k miles has never even been back to the dealer I bought it from in 1997.  

I feel bad that Saab is no longer around.  Someone has just released some new designs that were left on the drawing board when Saab was shuttered, which would have been future models.  Sad, really.  They deserved a better parent than GM.  

BTW, the last several posts above (with links in them) are spam...