I have a habit (and got my wife into the same habit), we use a quick disconnect keychain.

We disconnect the car key from all of our other keys before we insert it into the ignition. I keep all weight off keys at all times.

 

I wish GM would just go about this the right way. And recall every car with their crappy PASSLOCK system. I'm on my 4th ignition switch in my Monte. And calling it the key's fault, or your key chain's fault, is a major cop out.

 

That's a Super idea > Thanks 4 sharing 'Mike

I agree, GM is wasting our taxpayer's bail out $'s on giving you a key with a hole (they didn't even have the courtesy to ask you to bend `over )
I sure hope they improve & have learned a lesson (?) If not they are going to lose>again & many customer's will not come back
======================
p.s. I was trying to buy a Chevy MAXX from one of the seniors & I checked & they have many recalls & tech reports...It has lots of bad issues/problems...Maybe that's why they don't make'em anymore ?

 

Passlock is really terrible, I havent had any issues with my monte with it but when I had my 1998 Lumina the passlock was messed up. Sometimes I would go to start the car and it wouldn't start until about 5 minutes later because of the passlock and they had the keys with the chime thing in the middle. It was a real dumb design.

 

GM has totally gone down the drain. They don't own up to any problems. The rust problems of Monte Carlos should make GM cry with embarrassment. To make things worse, the newer 2006 and 2007 are even worse. Shame on you GM.

Now the failures. Just replaced my wife's transmission in her 2012 Malibu (6 speed) with 158K miles on it. I changed the fluid every time I changed the oil. GM new transmission? $4,800.

I just dumped my 2008 Buick Lucerne CXL. The blend door broke (try and find one) so we had no heat coming out the bottom. Price to fix? $1200, because the entire dash has to come out. The remote start failed, it would crank but the car would not start. But it would start with the remote once warmed up. Dealer could find no way to fix it. EVAP broke on same car - $400.

Want an older Monte Carlo from up North, like Indiana? Have fun.





This is how the outside looked. Who would have thought the rust would be this bad?

 

Rust isn't just a GM problem- lots of cars near the ocean or in areas with winter salting experience severe rusting. The problem is people will not pay what it costs to have a truly rust proof car. So the manufacturer settles for 'good enough' for the normal life expectancy of a vehicle. I know some people like to think thats 25 years and 500k miles, but that's not what an OEM considers normal life expectancy.

I'm also surprised to hear you say its going downhill. IMO rusting on 70s/80s/90s cars is just as bad, if not worse. Ive seen plenty of cars from that time period (at the same time from date of manufacture) with fist sized holes in the doors, quarters, and floor boards.

Just curious, but why would you buy a brand new transmission for a car that old? A junkyard trans would've been 1/4 of that and even a full rebuild maybe only half. A properly done rebuild likely would last just as long as a new trans. Theres no good reason to replace all of those hard parts with brand new.

I get that specific job sucks, but IMO GM is far from the worst when it comes to crap like that. Some German stuff is absolutely absurd to work on for almost any job.



You complain they won't own up to their "mistakes", but honestly - what do you expect them to do? Do you really think they should give you an entire brand new body for your rust issue and a new transmission for your 100k+ mile, 10-15 year old cars?

You realize if all manufacturers were held to that standard, you would never be able to afford to buy another car again. The average brand new car is already $40k+, I'd bet that price would at least double if they were forced to fix / replace every failure indefinitely. Used cars prices would surge by enormous amounts with an indefinite warranty like that.

 

When you buy a car that costs $25 to 33K there are some expectations of quality. It would not cost GM very much at all due to the volume of cars they build to put some form of undercoating on them. They should come with a warning, literally, that says if you don't pay Ziebart $400 this thing will fall apart. Saw a DE 2004 on FB and talked to the lady for a while. She was only asking $3500, and it looked brand new. 107K miles. She said the only issue was a slight rust around the back fenderwell. Know how this is a sign of real cancer, I asked if she had looked underneath. She said no, why should I? I pay to have this car waxed and cleaned. The next day she called me in tears. The car was gone. She had to sell it as a donor. I don't feel this is normal. I have learned not to buy northern cars. Just bought 2006 MC out of Oklahoma, and it was almost perfect. I used to laugh at those Ziebert ads, now I totally understand them.

Yeah, a BMW cost some money, but you rarely see them rust. But sure, an AC problem can cost $5,000. But you are paying $75K for a luxury car. Most like that can afford to dump them in a few years and buy a new one. Only the foolish buy a 10 year old one.

My wife is a travel nurse, and uses her car in her work. This is a well taken care of car. A rebuilt 6 speed is $4200, so why not get a new GM tranny with 3 year warranty good at any GM dealer? This car has more than paid for itself, and is still in good condition. Ecotecs are good motors. She is 5'1, so it fits her great. Oh yeah, and we had a seat failure where GM didn't use the proper bracing and the front part of the seat frame collapsed. Should have been a recall. But we pulled it and had it welded. She makes $82 an hour, and puts some miles on her car. No sense in dumping a good car because of a rotten tranny. So we keep it for a few years then dump it. I only paid $5300 for it with 128K miles. I tend to know what i am doing, other than getting taken by the rust problems of the MC. Never have seen an Impala with this problem. One reason I moved up to a 2006 MC, Same platform.

To sum up, I get it that cars have a lifespan. Especially ones not treated well. But this rust issue is just pathetic. I can still remember seeing commercials from GM about how they put these cars in a high life simulator and bake, then freeze, add salt water, etc. to ensure their cars don't rust. The rear fenderwells on Chevy trucks almost killed them in the 70s. They are developing the Asian mentality of cars being disposable. You don't fix, you replace. What is even worse is we had a 2014 Malibu (trying to move up and keep with the times) and after living at the dealer with electrical problems we (and them) pretty much gave up fixing the car. After spending $1500 on it, with a car with 85K miles we had enough and dumped it. This is not the GM I grew up with.

 

I feel all manufacturers have their faults. Just my comparison:
- a lot of GM FWD cars have wheel bearings fail. For me, it is normally the ABS speed sensor that is IN the hub (I HATE that design, my old 1994 Grand Am used an external sensor and it worked GREAT). I can easily change one of those 99% of the time in one hour (getting tools out and ending with putting tools away). I helped a friend with an Audi. GOOD LORD! Way more involved (as you changed the bearings, not the full hub assembly). And they used 12 point female head bolts. We had to order a special socket because no store locally had it!
- That same Audi had a windshield replaced. The wipers needed adjusted (as they were over sweeping the windshield). It had to be re-programmed in the computer!

As for rust, I see tons of vehicles around me of all makes/models rotting out. I daily drive a 2004 Grand Am with over 190k miles and that is holding up better than some of the newer cars I see. All manufacturers apply some rust undercoating to the big problem areas, but obviously don't do everything. Nothing stops the consumer from having an aftermarket company do some undercoating. And there are various theories on preventing rust from under coating to electrolysis systems.

As for some GM specific stuff, compare my 2004 Grand Am to earlier years of that generation of Grand Am. You can absolutely tell issues that had to be penny pinching as GM entered financial hardship. A good example, when you set your cruise and are now letting cruise control manage your speed, the Grand Am has a light on the instrument cluster to let you know you are cruising (hit the brake or turn off cruise control and that light goes out). Well, in 2004 GM got rid of it. I was told it was impossible to re-add it. Well a friend with an electronics background looked at the board, took an educated guess, popped in a resistor and an LED in the spots on the board for them and BAM, I now have that light back. Crazy, but they were pinching pennies to really stay a float.

The item *I* wish all manufacturers did was use stainless steel brake and fuel lines. Think of the safety problems when a brake line rots out or the issues if a fuel line leaks. Forget longevity, I am thinking raw safety. But sadly, it's not done.

We can in theory want a manufacturer to do any list of things, but in the end, they are trying to make a product that has a limited life. If they made them out of all the best ideas, it would make it hard for them to sell new cars (which right now, they have problems in general due to supply chain issues, so perhaps looking back they should have upped the quality a bit, but who saw this mess coming).

 

Common flaw for GM, but I can live with a wheel bearing failing. They are, after all, sealed, and only have so many miles on them. I agree with the stainless steel brake lines. I see MCs all the time with this failure, because they rust so bad. Making them in Canada you would think they understand cold and snow.

What my largest complaint is that they knowingly keep producing flawed products without correcting it, as with the 3.8 upper and lower intake gaskets. This has been going on since the mid 90s. Also the glitch in the trannys. The sticky solenoid that makes them lurch so bad, and I keep my fluid changed regularly. So I can't forgive them for repeatedly doing this over and over.

I had a huge laugh/cry on the Buick forum about mine and many others. They have some GM guy that trolls the board giving lip service to all the problems, and they are just total bull****. The moderator finally lit into him and said just shut up and save your blather. You have never done anything to help anyone get a car fixed. I have talked to them. It is a joke. They give you a list of known places like Cardid, Auto Zone, etc to find parts that are obsolete (as we both know they don't want you fixing them). I should have saved it and framed it.

The problem is with the advent of Fuel Injection these engines are running up to 250k miles. So unless other things finally fail, they just drive them into the ground. I am also seeing tons of cars for sale with rebuilt titles. It is a real mess out there and it will only get worse. Ma and pa garages will not be able to spend the money to keep up with the electrics on these cars. Guy was telling me at a GM Store that all new cars now have chips in the engine and tranny, and if they do not agree with the ECM they will not run. The shadetree mechanic has ended.

And one more word of caution. I am seeing people buying dashes out of wrecked cars, with lower miles than the ones they are trying to sell. Some guy in Arkansas tried to sell me one with 90K miles on it. I ran a Carfax and the car had 231K miles. Since an Impala hasn't changed from 2006 to 2016 you will see a rash of this. Be careful.

 

I'm not sure which vehicle you're talking about, but Chevy in general sells cars on the VERY low end of the price spectrum for a given category. You're never going to get the best quality out of a company that targets the bottom end of the market.

IMO the quality they're concerned about is 1) making it through the factory warranty period without excessive claims 2) not having quality so much worse than your competitors that your buyers don't ever come back. They do want the vehicle to fail eventually so they can sell you a new one - it just can't fail in half the time as your neighbors XYZ brand.

Making sure a car is still high quality/ reliability at 15 years old with 100k+ miles isn't high on their priority list when bean counters are chopping the price to more aggressively market on that basis.

As above, they don't care about your 15+ year old car. From their perspective (and that of many budget automakers) its time to buy a new one. Chevy isn't known for making cars that last forever (and haven't been as long as I've been alive) - they're just trying to keep it alive roughly as long as the other budget competitors.

Also IMO undercoating is a band aid and not a good solution to the problem. Having worked extensively with salt fog requirements on aviation structures, there are materials and coatings for everything on the underbody of the car (floor pans, springs, lines, bolts,, etc) to make them last virtually forever. But again, the people they're marketing to want a cheap car so that will always take precedence over anything that adds even a single dollar to the cost.

Honest question- do you really believe that rust resistance is significantly worse today than it was 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago at GM?

I've just known a lot of people with 80s/90s GM beaters that have literal holes in them from rust through. I just really struggle to belive that the cars they're making today are drastically worse than how already awful those cars were. It seems to me like they've been doing a poor job at rust prevention and just continue to do so year after year.

I had a buddy in college with a late 80s Grand Am. Floors looked like someone shot them with bird shot from all the rust holes under the carpet. Both lower doors had softball size holes that you could literally see the plastic door card inside. Literally every piece of metal in the car was either broken or well on the path to breaking from rust. Thats why I have a hard time thinking that modern GM is so much worse than it used to be.