GM, I’m looking at you!
We have a 2017 Chevy Volt. Don’t get me wrong. It has been a great car. It has the plugin hybrid characteristics that fit our needs perfectly. We occasionally take long trips with it to places like the beach or the Columbia Gorge but most of the time, it’s 56 mile EV range is more than enough for what we need wandering between destinations in the Portland area.
Except when it is dead.
We have 40k miles on it and sometimes things break. If it was a gas car, an injector would go bad or racoons would rampage in the back seat. Things happen. On an EV or plugin car, it’s a “control module”. Well, a control module gave up the ghost so I took it down to my local Chevy dealer and they ran their diagnostics. Bad module. Simple enough. Order one from GM, swap it in, run the diags again, and give me a call.
Well, they gave me a call, “We ordered it and it is on National Backorder.”
That was June 30. Today is Sept 30.
I called again today for my monthly status check and it is still on backorder, National Backorder, and no, GM can’t say when… It seems that National Backorder, a Just In Time Black Hole, is where perfectly good cars and trucks go when their go has gone. The nice lady told me they have five brand new Bolts (the Chevy full EV) sitting in the back lot (for months) for lack of battery parts. Other poor sots have waited over 6 months! And its’ not just EVs. Big truck owners can’t get parts. Sure, the pandemic made a mess of supply chains. But this has been going on for 2.5 years! And someone hasn’t been able to figure out how to make/get modules and parts? Nobody has a repair depot where they can repair modules? Come on! Heck, the Russians can cannibalize Ukrainian washing machines to find parts for their guidance systems and GM can’t find some transistors down at Radio Shack or Surplus Gizmos?
I told the nice young lady at the dealership that I thought they were still doing a good job. I still like the car. I want it back. But it is time to invoke the Lemon Law, only not on the car, the company that can’t maintain it.
The slow, dumb, Russian military isn’t the only outfit with logistics problems. Send all those useless GM execs and MBAs to the front where they can be more useful as speed bumps… Find an engineer who knows how to actually fix things. I’ll supply the solder.
Sigh.
Rant off.