After the last round of issues with my 2010 Equinox stalling back in November the dealership finally resolved the issue after doing numerous oil changes to remove the debris from the engine block.  With that problem behind me I though it would be smooth sailing going forward, but alas my car continues to have new and exciting issues.

The week before Christmas the HVAC control system turned itself off while I was driving and I couldn’t adjust the heat in the car – annoyed and now cold I called OnStar.  The rep checked the GM database and he informed me the fix was to unplug the unit or restart the car.  After restarting the car several times the unit finally came back on.  I called my dealership the next day and they told me the same thing – there is no fix for the issue, just restart the car when it happens.  Later that week a friend sent me a link to a US recall for the issue – but so far there is no recall for Canada.

Then on Christmas day my “Check Engine” light came on.  Not wanting to drive the car with a potential issue we were forced to rearrange our Christmas plans to work around the vehicle issues – I’d like to personally thank GM for messing up my Christmas.  After Christmas I got the car to the dealership who found the issue – it was with the air intake manifold and was a simple fix already in the GM database.

But I’m still stuck with the HVAC system randomly going off – it’s happened several times now and with winter conditions in Canada its not very safe to have your defrost and heating controls go offline while you’re driving.  I talked to my dealership about the US recall, but since there isn’t a Canadian recall for the issue yet they can’t do anything.  Wonderful.

I’ve got a call in to GM Canada to see if they can give me an ETA on when to expect a recall but I’m not holding my breath.  At this point I’m just completely frustrated with my Equinox – every day I have to wonder what’s going to go wrong next.

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So after my last post about GM reading my blog, I got a call from GM Executive Response who informed me that I should take my vehicle back to my dealer and they would send a field engineer to look at the car and resolve my issues.  Since this is the 5th time in 5 weeks it’s been back to the dealership my confidence is low, but I’m going to give them this chance to make things right.

Now we play the waiting game – will this be the last time it has to go back?  I’m hoping that it is.

I’m still amazed at the power of the internet – yesterday I was getting nowhere with GM, but after making my story public I’m finally getting the traction I think this issue deserves.  But as a friend of mine pointed out, what are less technically savvy people supposed to do?  How do they get their voice heard and their issues resolved?  Personally I think GM needs to pay a bit more attention to customer service – 24 “business hours” for a response isn’t acceptable in this digital age of twitter, facebook, blogs, and real time information flow.  I will continue to update this blog as my saga progresses, so stay tuned to see how well the “new” GM handles my issue.

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Update – Nov 13th, 2009 – Just changed this post to remove the phone number.  GM has already contacted me, so there is no need to leave the number publicly displayed now.

It’s been less than 12 hours since I posted the tale of my 2010 Chevy Equinox, and it looks like someone at GM noticed – my server logs show people from GM have viewed my post and have been reading my site.  Hopefully this means I might start to get some traction on the issue.  I guess that’s the power of the internet & twitter

I realized that since there is no contact information anywhere on the site, there is no easy way for someone to contact me and discuss the issues, so if anyone from GM wishes to speak with me they can call me at <REMOVED> – I want to make it very easy for anyone from GM to contact me.  For what it’s worth, I’m still waiting a call back from my customer service rep.

The ball is in your court now GM – will you step up and make me a happy customer?

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Update Nov 10, 2009 – GM has responded to my post and I’ve posted an update about what’s going on now.

Before I begin, I’d like to start by saying that if it wasn’t for the issues below, I would be in love with the 2010 Equinox – it has all the features I could want (Bluetooth, MP3, OnStar, etc) and is a very comfortable ride.  That said, my experience so far has been trying to say the least.  For the past 4 weeks my car has been in the dealership 4 times, and today it looks like I’m going to have to take it back again – it’s misshifting, “bunny hopping” when going into park, and *almost* stalled twice.  It does this weird thing with the tachometer when at low speeds where it will go up/down/up/down/up/down then stall, but if I hit the gas it seems to prevent the stall.

I contacted GM last week and “Shelly” was assigned to my case.  I left a message for her today and am awaiting a call back before I take the car to the dealer to have the latest round of issues investigated.

I’ll be updating this more now as I think it’s time time to put some public pressure on GM to get this issue resolve the ongoing issues.  Click on the “more” link to see history of the issues so far that I sent to GM last week.

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