My 2006 Pontiac Grand Prix isn’t on the General Motors recall list, but an experience I had last year makes me wonder if it should be.
I first noticed the problem when I was approaching a stoplight in early July. As I was braking, my car suddenly became unresponsive. The engine shut off, along with the power steering. After stomping the brakes, I turned the key off and on, and the car miraculously came back to life. Weird.
It happened again a few days later. This time I was going up a hill, approaching a stop sign, when the power steering locked up. With some effort I got the car restarted, but it shut down again a few blocks later. Something was definitely wrong.
“This isn’t just another business challenge. This is a tragic problem that never should have happened. And it must never happen again.”
I removed the key from my overloaded keychain and handed it off to the mechanic. He had a hard time getting the car to stall again with the diagnostic tool attached, but finally got a code suggesting the throttle body should be replaced. I paid $876 for the parts and labor (including fixing some dents and dings) and thought my car was safe to drive again.
Two weeks later, the stall happened again. This time I took the car to a Chevrolet dealership (which you’re supposed to do with Pontiacs, since the brand was discontinued two years after mine rolled off the lot). The mechanic couldn’t replicate the problem, but noticed an O-ring missing on the PCV Valve. He replaced the part and wrote that it “seems to be alright.”
The total cost was $234. My car hasn’t stalled since, so I figured the problem was fixed.
That was until February of this year, when GM announced it was recalling about 800,000 Chevrolet Cobalts and Pontiac G5s because of an ignition switch problem. A faulty part called the “switch detent plunger” didn’t provide enough torque to keep the car from accidentally turning off when heavy keychains created a pendulum motion. The result was that the car would lose power steering, anti-lock brake systems, and most scary of all, the ability to deploy air bags in the event of an accident (which is highly likely when you can’t steer or stop your car properly).
So far this year, GM has already recalled twice as many cars as it sold all last year.
GM linked the faulty ignition switch to 13 deaths, but that was an extremely conservative estimate that only counted victims killed as a direct result of head-on crashes when the airbag didn’t deploy. In one case where the ignition switch shut off and caused a collision, for example, GM tallied the death of the woman in the front seat whose airbag didn’t deploy but not the death of her passenger in the back seat, which didn’t have an airbag that could fail. Reuters took a more skeptical look for a June 3 report and found 74 deaths linked to the faulty ignition switch.
By the end of February, the GM recall had more than doubled, to 1.6 million vehicles. In April, the recall mushroomed to 6.26 million. Just last week, the company added 3.4 million cars to the list, bringing the yearly total to a staggering 20 million. So far this year, GM has already recalled twice as many cars as it sold all last year.
Not all of those cars were recalled because of the ignition switch problem. After CEO Mary Barra was brutally upbraided by Congress in April, GM realized it had a full-blown PR crisis on its hands and started issuing recalls for every little problem it discovered, from windshield wipers to daytime running lights (you can find a full list here).
“…I never want anyone associated with GM to forget what happened. I want this terrible experience permanently etched in our collective memories,” Barra told Congress last week. “This isn’t just another business challenge. This is a tragic problem that never should have happened. And it must never happen again.”
So far, the 2006 Pontiac Grand Prix hasn’t been included in any of the recalls, and there’s no indication the ignition switch problem affects that make and model. But I can’t help but harken back to my own experience with mysterious stalling, and GM has done little to calm my nerves. You’d think the company could’ve figure out the first time around which cars include the problematic ignition switch—shouldn’t they have a database of which parts are in each model?
A June 5 report by former Attorney General Anton Valukas suggests incompetence rather than a cover-up is to blame, citing GM’s “failure to understand, quite simply, how the car was built.” (Which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the automaker either.) The Valukas Report chronicles a dysfunctional corporate culture where everyone agrees something should be done but nobody goes and does it (known internally as “The GM Nod.”)
As for me, I’m still driving my 2006 Pontiac Grand Prix—albeit with a lighter key chain and one eye out for recalls. All in all, the drumbeat of faulty parts has begun to feel like a twist on the Mark Twain quip about New England weather: “If your GM car hasn’t been recalled yet, just wait a week.”
UPDATE:
Another week, another GM recall, and as predicted in this post, my car is finally on the list. Among the 7.6 million cars being recalled in the latest round are Pontiac Grand Prix models made between 2004 and 2008. They are being recalled for “unintended ignition key rotation,” which is exactly the problem I described encountering in this post. You can find a complete list of today’s GM recalls by clicking here.
Kevin Hoffman is the former editor-in-chief of City Pages, the alternative weekly of the Twin Cities. E-mail him at kevinhoffman1976@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter: @Panopticon13
Read more stories like this one by following the main Alt Ledes page here. Also, Medium has an app!
