At about 66,500 miles ago I took my car in to your service center for an oil change and rear brakes. Then I had a horrible experience on Thursday driving to the LAX airport to pick up my wife. I was somewhat nervous to begin with because after the service the 2010 Buick was having some weird electrical issue before in which it kept resetting the radio and clock to defaults, and the navigation system would not retain its settings. But THIS time the transmission apparently disengaged while I was in the fast lane during extremely heavy traffic at 2:00pm. The engine was running, but the transmission, while "in gear" simply went to sleep, like it wasn't even there. All of the lights on the shifter console flashed various signals and then went blank, and my car coasted to a stop before I could make it to the right shoulder. Cars poured by my like I was a boulder jutting out of a raging river, and they honked their horns angrily and slowed only long enough to glare at me in disgust for slowing their commute or to flip me off. I had a major panic attack. My phone was in my briefcase in the trunk but I couldn't get out of the car. I thrashed around at the controls and console of the car like a rat frantically trying to escape a sinking ship. Finally, and to my surprise, after about 5 minutes the transmission engaged and the car rolled again, but the check engine light (shaped like a transmission) turned on and stayed on, indicating that something is wrong with the transmission system. I got to the airport okay, and we drove home without incident, but I drove in the slow lanes and could not take my eyes of that check engine light, just waiting for the car to stall again.

I took it to a Buick dealer the next day, but now the "check engine" light was no longer displayed. The service Rep said he thought it was a transmission control switch failure, and since the switch is located inside the transmission it is an expensive fox - $1100.00! But I researched this on line at the dealer and discovered that some others had "bought" this suggested repair and it did NOT correct the problem, not did the dealerships credit them for the repair when the problem repeated just weeks later. As a retired systems analyst and programmer with 30 years of computer experience, I am almost certain this is a program error (bug) in the ECM firmware. Since it has potentially fatal consequences I think GM should issue a recall, but the number of cats involved could be so late that they do not want to bear that burden until someone losses their life and/or this flaw gains more attention.