Remember the Toyotas with uncontrolled acceleration problems? Fined $1.2bn: BBC World Service - Business Matters, Toyota Fined $1.2bn

Thankfully the S-Type uses different sensors so shouldn't be able to suffer in the same way.

 

Toyota essentially admitted to criminal actions after years of hiding serious problems....

GM is next in line....

 

Do tell. What have GM done (allegedly)?

 

The allegations against GM are not as serious (yet) as those admitted to by Toyota, but GM has admitted to knowing about ignition lock problems dating back at least a decade that can cause the ignition to switch off while driving, turning the airbags off at the same time. There have been several deaths in the US as a result. GM's current instruction to their customers afflicted with these switches is to remove all other keys from your key ring except your car key in order to lessen the weight and decrease the chances for your switch to turn off by itself while driving....

GM's biggest problem will be that this has been going on in various models for ten years now, they've known about it, and they chose not to act. Their new female CEO (Mary Barra) has recently apologized, admitted company guilt, named a new safety czar (a colleague she's known for more than 30 years), and proclaimed that she will get to the bottom of this as well as change the culture of the company. But it won't be enough to keep GM from being fined big-time, though probably not as much as Toyota was....

 

Speaking broadly.....and I know this is a grossly over-simplified perspective, considering the world we live in, but.....

When will people (corporations, CEOs, elected officials, community leaders, the local businessman, your brother-in-law, whoever) learn that it's best to just admit "We f**ked up", take their lumps, fix the problem, and move on?

Admitting fault and accepting responsibilty for mistakes is universally admired ...while denial and obfuscation inevitably turns out to be more damaging than the original sin.



Cheers
DD

 

Jon - thanks. I'd not heard of that.

 

Doug,

The answer to your question is "Never"....

 

Doug I agree with you but we need to understand the huge disaster we have in the US concerning lawyers.

We have a lawyer enrichment scheme masquerading as a legal system.

BP learned this with their oil spill. They admitted blame and attempted to pay all the claims but the claims simply never stopped coming. So it would have been far cheaper for them to stonewall the problem and fight it out in the courts and pay only what was awarded in the law suits.

Same issue with the tobacco law suits. It enriched the lawyers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that was supposedly not the point of the law suits but it really was!!
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WELL PLAYED, Doug!!!


Jon, maybe I'm too cynical but her defense just struck me as channeling her inner Obama, "Whyyyyyyyy, I've worked here all my life but I never heard of this issue til I sawr it on the newds - like all of you!"

 

Zane,

You're not cynical at all. Barra's comments have been very calculated thus far and I'm sure every word she utters has been cleared by a bevy of staff attorneys....

I grew up with GM vehicles. But due to GM's local, regional, and national decisions to consistently and continually ignore their infamous failing/peeling grey metallic paint issues on my 1990 Chevy S-10 pickup, I wrote a letter to their CEO in 1997 stating that I would never again purchase a GM product and would always advise my family members to do the same. I wound up donating that truck to charity in 2000 (replacing it with my current much-beloved 1999 Dodge Ram 1500) and I have remained true to my word....

 

Really? When was this? Just curious.

I'm a little surprised to hear this because for several years GM was picking up the tab (sometimes fully, sometimes partially) for new paint jobs. The dealer I worked for at the time had so many takers on the offer we were scheduling 2-3 months out and the body shop had to hire more help to accomodate the work load. It was quite a gravy train, actually, once everyone was geared up.

Cheers
DD

 

I hear ya, Jon! I had a beautiful dark gray metallic Century T-Type in 1986 when it was new. 2 yrs later it looked like crap (duller than our helo's and the ships we were flying them to/from) so I had it "detailed" and that restored it for my wedding. Within months, the paint started blowing off all skyward-facing horizontal surfaces - hood, top, trunk. Doug, as I recall it was either before Algore invented the internet or during it's infancy but somehow I got wind of these "hidden warranty's" on the paint and made myself a festering boil on the **** of the dealership until they relented and played ball...I got a total repaint for $400 or something as I recall. Signficant discount but it sure seemed like "my part" was big at the time. They tried everything to skate out of it - finally playing the trump card of "Well the warranty is for cars < 5 yrs/100k mi and so....being over 100k we'd be happy to paint it but your car doesn't qualify..." and they had some printed paper that described the deal - unfortunately, for them...it was dated...so I whipped out a sheaf of service orders from the same dealer where I'd been in complaining of peeling paint (I would always lodge a paint-complaint anytime I took it in for whatever service I needed...and they had an ecm issue resulting in random stalling that they finally did a recall on...so I visited alot) but I pointed out the date on their warranty description preceded almost all of my service orders - orders that proved my car was within the time/mileage standards set-forth...and they hadn't said "Boo" about the warranty......"Well then, when can we paint it for ya?" IIRC, this argument spanned 2 or 3 yrs' time.

So Jon's story was played out many times, I'm sure, even though you saw lots of paint jobs being scheduled. Only the most relentless, ****-record-keeping, sloths with little social life managed to perservere to achieve an actual paint job. FWIW...BMW had the same problem in the mid 80's and blamed it on the port of Jacksonville, FL...but that's just good German Engineering for ya....Problem with yo kah? I can assure you there is a large room in a building in Stuttgart filled with 3-ring binders that will demonstrate whatever is malfunctioning is because it has been misused/abused/neglected.

 

Actaully, thinking back on it, I'm not all that surprised after all.

One of the frustrating things about car manufacturers, at least the ones I was involved with, is that the administration of warranty repairs can be inconsistant.

On many issues, the paint problems of the 80s-90s being a good example, the ease or difficulty of getting some repairs done can vary from region to region, zone to zone, or even down to, frankly, the whim of district management or specific dealership.

The vast majority of those paint repairs were done on cars that were beyond the warranty period. We painted several hundred (as did scores of other dealers) but from a legal aspect each one was considered a 'case-by-case goodwill decision', thus protecting GM. A hard and fast, consistant policy from on high obviously flies in the face of 'case-by case' decisions.

For various reasons some dealers are given broader latitude than others in making goodwill decisions (or, for that matter, even non-goodwill decisions). A customer could visit several dealers and get varying responses. Lots of opportunity for trouble and dissatisfaction there.

Anyhow, in So Cal in the early 90s GM was liberal on the paint issue. We were encouraged to get customers' cars painted and make 'em happy. But, yes, it was 'secret' in the sense that a customer had to complain first. We couldn't solicit the work or advertise (literally or figuratively) that assistance was available.

(Actually, soliciting warranty repairs of any kind, goodwill or otherwise, is frowned upon. There were notable exceptions but GM generally doesn't want to pay for repairs unless a customer complains of a fault...even if the car is only a week old)

Oh well, I'm rambling. I spent decades dealing with this stuff. I oughta write a book


Cheers
DD

 

Doug,

This occured during 1996 into 1997. Faulty grey metallic paint that would crack, peel, and blow off as Zane described. It was a well-known issue that GM refused to publicly acknowledge, and it happened to my S-10's tailgate. All I asked for was my tailgate to be sanded down to metal, reprimed, and repainted. Not my entire truck, just the tailgate. Because my truck was six years old when this issue began, the local dealership blew me off. So I requested for the regional manager to get involved. He was more understanding but still told me there was nothing he could do. So I got corporate involved, and they blew me off with a three-sentence letter after supposedly speaking with the local dealership and that regional manager. All I ever asked for was to have my tailgate refinished at GM's expense!

My experience with Chrysler several years before was very satisfying. My black 1988 Jeep Cherokee's roof and liftgate had sun-faded by 1994, also a well-known paint issue at that time with my particular black color. I called Chrysler's customer care center in Detroit, explained my situation, they listened to me and sent a field rep to my house to take a look. My Jeep was nearly six years old at the time, but he looked at my detailed self-service documentation, knew that I had properly cared for my Jeep, and decided on the spot that Chrysler would pay to take the entire vehicle down to bare metal and completely refinish - not just the faded roof and liftgate. I got to pick the body shop I preferred. They had my Jeep for two weeks and did a fantastic refinishing job with Chrysler picking up the entire tab....

That was our second Jeep. We've purchased three more since then....

 

Yeah, by then GM was getting tired of paint work and was closing the door.





Pretty stupid on their part. It was just a tailgate. At warranty rates it wouldn't have cost them but a couple hundred dollars to make you happy.

I don't doubt your story for a second but I must say that any of the district reps I worked with in that time frame would probably have been mad at me if I turned you down for such a simple thing. Broadly, the attitude was "if you think the customer's case has merit, offer them *something*".

Later, in the 2000s, GM (and others) started tightening the belt. If money gets tight the *first* thing they look at is warranty expense....and districts with the highest expense are the most heavily scrutinized. Thus, a customer who is deserving of some help might get turned down just because that zone or district is under particular scrutiny.

The nemesis for any dealer service manager is the newbie district rep who hasn't learned 'how things really work'. Not being confident enough to make decisions in gray areas, or perhaps wanting to make a name for himself by lowering district expenses, he/she takes a particularly hard nosed approach. We used to joke (and complain) how it took us a couple years to properly train a factory rep....and then a another newbie would be assigned to the area .

I'm not sorry to be out of that game, I tell ya.

Cheers
DD

 

Since my notorious "GM Tailgate Incident", there have been zero GM vehicles purchased in our household, our daughter's household, my mother's household, both of my sisters' households, my mother-in-law's household, and my two brother-in-laws' households. Add up all the vehicles purchased in those households since then and the total is between 45 and 50. I'd like to think I've done my fair share of sticking it to GM....

 

Toyota and GM announced today that as a goodwill gesture to their customers affected by various models' failures during the past few years, they will collaborate on a newly-designed vehicle to be rushed into production by mid-2014. Whenever any Toyota components cause sudden unintended acceleration, GM components will immediately kill the vehicle's ignition switch. This new model will be named the Total Recall....

 

Posted just a few days early!

Good, though.