2017 Camaro SS LT1 Misfires - Dealer Can't/Won't Fix

adam525i said:

It makes you wonder what sort of history would pop up for this car in a Carfax, hopefully enough to scare someone away.

Glad you're rid of it.

Adam

What’s the VIN on the SS? Might be worth watching for resale, just out of curiosity. 

Years ago I had transmission problems with my Fiat 124 coupe that were not being fixed. I spoke to the National Service Manager and told him the next step was parking on the lawn at their headquarters and burning it to the ground. The car was 6 months old at the time. That got a tech from Italy to fix the trans and I had no more issues, Sometimes the nuclear option is your only choice. The OP is much more reasonable than i would have been.

Tom Suddard said:

Oh but for the record the LS is still the best engine ever and I plan to own many more of them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm just done with GM products that are supposed to transport people I care about. 

This Camaro didn't have an LS.

after all that, I would have been tempted to take it downtown and "accidently" drop the keys on the sidewalk nearby

Hard to keep customers returning to buy your products when they get treated like that. Especially when they tell you it’s the way you’re driving it causing the problem. So how do they test their cars? 

^That's carburetor-and-points crap for sure.

I thought I'd post some thoughts on this one year later:

The day I got rid of this car was one of the best days I've had in the last number of years. I can't begin to tell you how awful this situation made me feel. Today it feels like it occurred in an alternative reality; did I really go through all of it, or was it someone else? I couldn't possibly have been that stressed every day for that many months, etc...

It really did make me see how easily "wrong" can happen in today's world and how individuals can participate in such things as part of a larger system. GM flat out stole from me. Sometimes regulations and consumer protection laws can seem heavy handed, but unfortunately we live in a world where "doing the right thing" isn't something companies believe in. We can strive to make regulations/laws as fair and up to date as possible, but they are the lesser evil.

An enduring lesson of this for me is I will never put myself in a position again where I have a newer car of significant value. That's the only way I can avoid that happening to me again. I'll stick to a few years old and <$15k.

Another lesser learning I gained over time is for a street car I definitely prefer small/nimble/sensation of speed vs. higher performance/larger size.

In reply to Snrub :

Thanks for the update. I followed this thread all the way to the end. 

As one of my mentors used to say, "Every experience is a learning experience."

In reply to Snrub :

Let's not forget that I had an engineer from GM Performance ready and willing to help, and you refused.  So there's that.

I really wish we could have gotten to the bottom of what was wrong with it, because I'm still kind of baffled. And I've never seen another 6th-gen Camaro, or any LT engine for that matter, have that issue. I remember we briefly talked about you hauling it all the way to my dealership so we could dive into it.

AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to Snrub :

Let's not forget that I had an engineer from GM Performance ready and willing to help, and you refused.  So there's that.

I very much appreciated your help. I re-reviewed our emails just now to ensure I did not overlook/misremember something. I was initially slow to accept the generous offer, it took me a few days to accept. In the last one after I providing the VIN, I said "Thanks so much for your help, even though I'm a moron. :)" You responded with "Got it, thanks." Initially I was hesitant based on how I had been treated by GM to that point and the fact that I'd been very candid in this thread. Months later GM corporate told me unprompted that they were aware of this thread. I assume that was due to your contact. Again, very much appreciate the help, but I don't understand the characterization of "... and you refused".

I'm 90% certain of what the problem was and would have loved to get my hands on the car for verification.

FWIW, Honda and VW had drooly injector issues, but they tended to show up much later in life.  But the symptoms are the same.

I have a feeling this is also a London Ontario thing. It is possible that most of the dealers are owned by one organization since they all seem to follow the same formula when it comes to making their issues your issues.

You put in a lot of effort to prove you were smarter than everyone else, on a leased car nonetheless. Now you're convinced GM stole from you somehow? Did you turn in the lease at the end? If so you ended up exactly where you should have at the end of the lease. 
 

Wanting to buy the car at the end, is irrelevant, deciding not to buy it because it's junk is not stealing from you or causing you no harm. A lease contract is renting the car at x price for y months. That's what you did. No clue why you ever hooked up a code reader, much less doing it so many times. 

Steve_Jones said:

You put in a lot of effort to prove you were smarter than everyone else, on a leased car nonetheless. Now you're convinced GM stole from you somehow? Did you turn in the lease at the end? If so you ended up exactly where you should have at the end of the lease. 

I really wasn't trying to reopen the underlying issue, just wanted to share my thoughts a year after the car was gone...

I'm definitely not smarter than "everyone else." I don't claim to be smarter than GM on the technical side. I think there was ample evidence of poor decision making in how the technical problem solving was handled, assuming they had a sincere desire to fix the problem in a reasonable manner. That doesn't mean the technical people themselves were at fault, difficult problems persist, but upstream decisions constrained efforts and no one acted to isolate the person paying for the service, from the the inability to provide the service of a viable vehicle. The car was not in my possession for roughly 40% of the time I paid for the car, more or less did not work properly the remainder of the time and could not be relied upon for uses such as of town trips. Ignoring the substance of the technical problems, GM corporate had countless opportunities to rectify this contractual aspect of the situation and decided not to. In this aspect, they have my money, I cannot claim to be smarter than them. I believe "stole" is a reasonable and fair characterization. GM told me in their opinion they were under no legal obligation to ever provide a viable vehicle, as long as they continued to make attempts to repair (no matter how constrained/unsuccessful). On any issue there can be differences of opinion, you are welcome to share GM's.

It was blindingly obvious you were dealing with halfwits by the second spark plug change, and it was pretty clear before that.  You needed smarter mechanics who gave half a crap.

In reply to Snrub :

I respect your position.  
 

If you honestly felt GM was in breach of contract ("stole" in your words), why did you keep paying them?

I deal with contracted vendors every day. They do not get paid for non-performance.  If they breach the contract, I have no obligation to pay them.  Simple. 

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to Snrub :

I respect your position.  
 

If you honestly felt GM was in breach of contract ("stole" in your words), why did you keep paying them?

I deal with contracted vendors every day. They do not get paid for non-performance.  If they breach the contract, I have no obligation to pay them.  Simple. 

That’s all fine and good, until they file a lawsuit against you for breech of contract, and you need to start paying for legal representation out of your own pocket.  While not even remotely the same situation, trust me ... getting sued is expensive, and very stressful for a long time.  Especially when your opponent has much deeper pockets than any one individual has.

In reply to einy (Forum Supporter) :

It's never breach of contract if they breached it first. 
 

That's kinda my point. Accusing them of theft is pretty extreme. 

Maybe this is covered in the tread earlier, but would lemon law protection apply in this case, on a leased vehicle?

einy (Forum Supporter) said:

Maybe this is covered in the tread earlier, but would lemon law protection apply in this case, on a leased vehicle?

Canada.

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to einy (Forum Supporter) :

It's never breach of contract if they breached it first. 
 

That's kinda my point. Accusing them of theft is pretty extreme. 

I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of what it is, but I don't see how there's a way to make the system play out as though that were the case. GM wouldn't recognize that they were in breach of contract, or they would have fixed the car, replaced the car, or let him out of the lease. Without that recognition, it's his word against their word about who breached contract first, and even getting the opportunity to get a decision is going to be expensive.

I think that's why while "theft" may not be the legally correct term, it is something worse than just breach of contract, because GM's position allows them to deny Snrub the conventional recourse without substantial expense, or at least  the risk of substantial expense if he can't get all the way through the process, floating legal fees out of pocket, and get a judgment that recoups him for all. If GM were motivated by the fact of the nonworking car, they would already have taken one of the three actions (repair, replace, release) which corrected that breach.

Without a lemon law, GM is the authority about whether they themselves are in breach of contract until lawyers are involved. That's... not ideal.

Streetwiseguy said:

einy (Forum Supporter) said:

Maybe this is covered in the tread earlier, but would lemon law protection apply in this case, on a leased vehicle?

Canada.

Wow ... I naively thought Canadian citizens would have similar protection.  

In reply to Jesse Ransom :

You realize it was a lease, right?  He didn't own the car. 
 

There was no reason whatsoever to make lease payments on a car that was not in his possession. It's easy to blame "the man", but it's also not too hard to stop writing checks. 
 

I'm gonna stop now. We have been through this ad infinitum in this thread, and nothing good can come of this. 
 

I've been clear. We disagree. 
 

Me: "You can't walk away from a lease when the lessor asserts there is no issue."

SVreX: "You don't seem to realize it was a lease."

Oh well.