This data is from the NHTSA — the US gov't agency tasked with vehicle safety. Complaints are spread across multiple & redundant categories, & are not organized by problem.
So how do you find out what problems are occurring? For this NHTSA complaint data, the only way is to read through the comments below. Any duplicates or errors? It's not us.
I have been having problems with the rear brakes on my 1998 Lumina. They would drag and make a metal to metal noise. I took the car into frontier Chevrolet 5 times for this problem. As I said, the brakes made a metal to metal noise, the brakes would drag, sometimes even skidding the tires on dry pavement. This happened with light to moderate brake pressure on the petal. The last time I was into frontier Chevrolet, the shop forman told me that he was not going to fix it because he didn't see anything wrong. I contacted GM at their customer service hotline on at least two or possibly three occasions. I was told that they couldn't reach the shop forman and they would get back to me. They never did. I live in Montana where icy roads are a problem in the winter. With winter wether setting in I gave up on the dealer and took the car into an independent service center to have the brakes fixed. I didn't want to chance the brakes locking up on icy roads and sending me out of control. The independent mechanic soon discovered metal shavinge on the drums and other brake parts. He said the shoes were rubbing on the inside of the drums when the petal was depressed. This caused the shoes to bind inside of the drums, which caused the brakes to drag and possibly lock up. He measured the original shoes and the replacement shoes and found that even with 31,000 miles of rubbing on the inside of the drums, the original shoes were.007 wider than the replacements. My neighbor told me of a Pontiac Grand Am that she owned that had the same problem. She also took the car into the dealer, who could find nothing wrong. An independent mechanic ( in another city), told her that GM had installed the wrong shoes on her car. This leads me to believe that this is a widespread problem for GM. While this didnot cause an accident, it very easily could have if I hadn't had the car fixed at my own expense, even though the parts should have been covered under warranty. I hope you will look into this pro
A D V E R T I S E M E N T S
- Billings, MT, USA