Thursday, March 24, 2011

Off topic but interesting, at least to me

There is a special hell waiting for the GM automotive engineer who thought it would be an awesome idea to make the removal and replacement (at a book rate of $92) of a 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe's front bumper a necessary step to facilitating the replacement of a right front turn-signal bulb.

Fortunately for us, our service writer only charged half price for the job, as he also considers it criminally stupid to make such a simple maintenance chore so darn hard to accomplish.

Thanks, Government Motors, for helping to make our decision to end our almost three-decade association with you (because of the Obama Administration's takeover of your company) such an easy one.

2 comments:

Tim said...

Or how about an 04 SAAB 9-3 where the headlight bulb is held into the assembly with a small plastic locking ring - due to a design defect, the module it plugs into routinely fails spectacularly, and melts into a huge mess. The heat makes the locking ring extremely brittle, and almost impossible not to break when replacing the plug with their $12 repair kit. The kicker? the locking ring isnt available as a replacement part, and must be purchased as part of the entire headlight assembly, to the tune of about $400

Bike Bubba said...

Nothing new here; I remember removing most of the dash of a 1971 Chevy Townsman just to get at a leaking heater core. I would have thought that most of the car was sitting in the back seat.....

....that said, the lightbulb decision was probably the product manager trying to save a nickel on the BOM, not the engineers.