Rants
My run-in with GM
Ok, now I'm pissed. But first, some history.
In 1995 I purchased a Chevrolet Camaro Z28, new, from a local dealer, Ourisman's Rockmont Chevrolet, in Rockville MD. Along with it I paid a few thousand dollars for the 7-year, 50,000 mile extended warranty. The car has been in the shop at least once a year to fix piddly little shit - mostly resulting from poor workmanship and faulty designing. Aren't American cars great? Anyway, last year (with 46,000 miles on the odometer) I brought it back in to have a few things fixed under warranty. While they refused to fix most of it ("trim isn't covered" - a statement which I later found out was a lie), they did fix an annoying oil leak.
For the record, each time I've brought the car in for service, I've taken the opportunity to have the cooling system flushed. This has happened around once per year, so the coolant should always be in pristine condition.
When I swung by the dealership to pick up my newly repaired car, I was told by the service writer that the technician had noted that the coolant was in "really bad shape". On the ticket he'd scrawled "coolant looks bad. overflow full of oily sludge". After convincing the service writer that I'd not accidentally poured engine oil into the radiator, I tried to inquire as to what could have caused this condition, especially since the coolant was supposedly flushed annualy at this very dealership (for reference, on my previous vehicle, I'd gone three years before initially flushing the coolant, and it still looked absolutely perfect. So why, after less than 12 months, does my coolant look this bad?).
In an blatent "CYA" move, the service writer responded with "Eh, it's probably nothing to worry about. We've had lots of problems with this new coolant". I asked him if he was absolutely sure. He nodded. Off I went.
Around a month later (and still within the warranty period) I had the oil changed in the car. When the service technician checked the coolant, he also noticed the overflow to be full of slime. But wait! Didn't the Chevy dealership just flush this a month earlier? Now I wasn't so sure. The next day I phoned the dealership and asked. The service writer, obviosly annoyed with me, insisted that I ignore this because it was obviously a problem associated with the "new coolant".
Over the next several months, I drove the car to Upstate New York for the holidays, and on several other road trips. I piled around another 15,000-20,000 miles on the car before this spring, when I took it back in (this time to a different dealer, as I'd moved) for some recall work to be done (AIR pump). During this visit, I naturally asked for the cooling system to be flushed. The work was done promptly, and I returned to pick the car up a few days later.
Less than week later, I noticed a small wet spot on the ground under the car. I raised the hood to find a small coolant leak. Apparently a hose had not been properly tightened. I returned to the dealer to have this taken care of, at which time the technician checked the coolant overflow for coolant loss. What he found was oily black slime.
The service writer (Sam) stared with his mouth agape at this. "What the hell... I watched them blast that thing clean a few days ago. How can there be oil in it?" he sputtered. A good question for sure, the answer to which I was also interested in knowing. After a lengthy examination (by half of the techs in the shop) it was determined that "somehow oil was leaking into the coolant". I kid you not, these guys are rocket scientists.
After a talk with Sam and his manager, it was recommended to me that I call GM. I agreed. After 20 minutes on the telephone with GM's finest, I was advised to take the matter up with the people who originally found the problem.
I drove the car back to Rockmont and spoke with the service manager, Andy. I explained the problem and he asked me to leave the car so he could "call GM and get my warranty extended" (the 50,000 miles had now, of course, passed) so he could "fix my problem". This sounded good to me, so I left the car and "bussed it" to work for the next few days.
I should have known it was too easy. A few days later Andy called me and told me GM was unwilling to help. He suggested I call them (again), which I did, only to run into another brick wall. The GM tech told me that because the dealer had misdiagnosed the problem, they were then financially responsible for the repairs. My car sat at Rockmont for another week.
Another conversation with Andy - another call to GM, this time to a supervisor. I was told in no uncertain terms that "the mileage on the car at this moment in time was the only thing that mattered" to them. "Whether it's 1000 miles, 100 miles, or 100 feet... once the warranty is up, it's up". Apparently the red tape of the warranty has become more important than taking care of their customers. The real kicker was the line "if we took care of you, we'd have to take care of other's like you". God forbid.
Oh, and as a side note, GM is the world's largest corporation, and it pays no taxes. Gotta love corporate power running the country. God save King George II!
I explained to the GM tech that they would be paying for the repair in any case, because either they fix my car, or I'd never buy another GM again (and this is my 3rd, and their cost on this repair would probably be around 1% of what they've made off me to date). This proved fruitless, as the supervisor told me frankly that he could care less whether or not I ever bought another GM product again. They must have told him to say that in GM supervisor training class, eh?
So now, my only option seems to be a small claims lawsuit, which happens to be quite easy to initiate in Maryland. All I need is my original paperwork to prove that Rockmont knew about the problem before the warranty expired - paperwork that has unfortunately been misplaced during my last move. I contacted Andy at Rockmont on the off chance he'd print me out a copy. Amazingly, he agreed. I swung by the dealership to pick it up, only to be aggravated again when I found that none of the technician's hand-written notes had been transposed to the record copy of the document. Somehow "coolant looks bad. overflow full of oily sludge" had been reduced to "coolant poor condition". Not exactly descriptive. I'm thinking I've been quite a bit screwed.
I don't know where to go from here, but if you'd like, you can copy the following code and give me a link on your page. It's not much, but if I can talk even one or two people out of buying a GM, I'll feel better. Thanks, and cheers.
<a href="http://cydewaze.org/ramblings/nochevys.php"><img src="http://cydewaze.org/images/nochevys_sm.jpg" alt="No Chevys" border=0></a>
