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Comments
The suburban that you bought, did you buy it from a dealer or an individual?
It is General Motors I have the HUUUUUUGGEEEEE Problem with. Do not think for one SECOND, their filthy low down belly crawling layers and Corporate asset preservation teams don't see these threads. Ford Pinto gas tanks, Explorer Firestone tires, They were NOTHING compared to this fiasco. Please,,, if ANYONE knows of anyone who has actually been in an accident ,or was killed or injured. PLEASE get ahold of me or post here. This entire situation does not sit well with me. Also,, My entire family WAS gm forever, the brutal Ford Chevy battles.Monster trucks, nascar, We bought a new Caprice or silverado every other year. Like MANY in this thread, I have chased ALL of my friends, neighbors, customers to ANYTHING but a GM. This after many disc brake/fuel pump problems with prior models.
The shops biggest mistake was letting you tell them what to do. You aren't a technician and have no training so you have to learn all of this by experience. Yes you can get stuff cheaper off of the net, but those prices are for you to do it yourself, not for what you have done here. I have been a mechanic/technician all of my life and based on what you posted you have a long way to go to claim yourself as proficient. If you genuinely had experience you would have known about needing the car aligned and the sway bar links with the installation of the struts. It's not a stretch to believe that a real technician examining the Suburban prior to purchase would also have discovered a good number of the faults you described. Caveat Emptor.
The number one issue with all of this is that you want GM to goodwill you a rebuilt car. If GM did that, would you really treat them, or the dealer you mentioned any better? Meanwhile you have yet to explain why the rest of us have to chip in and pay for you to get a rebuilt used car because the manufacturer ultimately doesn't pay for stuff like that, its other customers do. Warranty expense is a cost that gets passed back onto the consumer just like every other part of doing business.
There are a lot of people who are in for a big surprise, the trade is running out of qualified techs. The people smart enough to really be good at the work are doing other things with their lives where they can make better money, have benefits, and not have to put up attitudes like the ones displayed in your posts. The shops that have the best techs today have learned to not try and fix every car. You wouldn't even have gotten past the phone call estimate with carry in parts.
As far as why your new used car has problems, it sounds like the previous owner didn't take as good of care of it as they should have and just let things go because they were planning on getting rid of it. Which by the way you'll find numerous posts advising people to do just that.
The struts. You tried to state that there would be marks that would allow you to put it back together "where the old one lived". That's partly true, however the marks that you would need would only be visible inside of the old strut that would be headed to the scrap pile. The knuckle would have marks, but they would be across the entire surface because it gets clamped inside of the larger strut. That means there are no marks to attempt to line up when you install new struts.
atc's car problems would just be a "normal day in the office" for me from the technicians side of the work, but he would never even get in the door when he tried to carry in his own parts. If someone pulled the google the price stunt on additional work as was described, that would be a deal breaker too and they would be immediately excused from the premises. Time and again people try and twist things like the car needing to be aligned when the struts were installed as just a money grab and that is totally false as it was in this case. It's popular for some consumers to pull tricks like that and then blame the shops if they end up disappointed with the outcome. It's a lack of knowledge and experience by other consumers that makes behavior like that allowable.
GMs Stabilitrak problems are helping either; people keep posting about them (as @berri said) and there seems to be several different causes, none of which are cheap or easy to track down.
Seems like auto mechanics lost in the court of public opinion decades ago.
Yea, but blaming all of the techs of today for the sins of some others only serves to perpetuate the problems at a time when that's the last thing the consumer ultimately needs. When consumers and yes even shops can't find techs that can handle relatively simple systems like stabilitrak, they are reaping what they have been sewing.
Doc has a point. I mean, let's say in my part of the world (an area that can post $145/hr shop rates) that it takes the tech 4 hours to track down and remedy the Stabiltrak problem and by golly, it was a loose connector that got corroded.
So the bill is $580 + $7 for parts. The consumer is not going to like that bill.
Dealer did diagnostics (for free since I bought it there?) and discovered the fuel pump was under pressure and the fuel mapping had gone to extremes trying to maintain power when the pump couldn't deliver. Replaced pump, reset everything (several times) - now runs with no stabilitrak alarms.
The mechanic said part of the problem lies in the architecture of the electronics. For physical reasons, several diagnostic circuits are channeled thru the same alarm pin on the chip and they can interfere with each other (probably oversimplifying here).
So the engine timing was screwy because of the low fuel pressure (and the E85?) and it affected stabilitrak and the tranny (really? The fuel pump bothers the tranny?) and that gave multiple things a rash. In my case, fixing the FP and then resetting the chip (alarms and engine fuel mapping) several times seems to have solved the problem. Two weeks and 2 tanks of E85 later, so far so good.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b15_1452781371
Lastly. If the misfire was cylinder #4, what was going on that they replaced the spark plug in cylinder #8? Is that a misprint?