not that it’ll do any good, but I’ve spent a good bit of time from the late '90s and through now working for a period at Chrysler and in the supply base. Yes, the problems you are talking about were real, but they can all be attributed to specific management decisions which made things the way they were. (a bit of conjecture on my part, but Chrysler was on the road to being a very good car company until Bob Eaton took over and kicked off a mandate of (short sighted) cost cutting which took pretty much all the goodwill they had built up with the Neon, new Ram truck, “cloud” cars, and LH, and trashed it overnight. I’m talking stuff like ruining the Neon due to oil leaks because they didn’t want to pay for a multi-layer-steel head gasket, under-spec-ing things like paint (remember peeling blue Neons and Rams?) A/C and steering components to eke out a few bucks on each (already profitable!) car, only to kick the can a couple years down the road to pay out a ton of warranty claims which weakened them to the point of being ripe for takeover by nickel-and-Daimler.
Then, of course, the Germans got their hands on the company and set out to make sure that Chrysler group vehicles were sufficiently down-market enough to protect the sanctity of their holy Mercedes-Benz which led to even more cost cutting and de-contenting to the point where pretty much every Chrysler group car had either a dark gray or light gray hard plastic interior.
now, at least the Fiat people let Chrysler people run Chrysler and give them the money to do it right.
can you tell I’m bitter? If you want a bit of a read, I can recommend Bob Lutz’s Car Guys vs. Bean Counters as a decent glimpse of what went wrong with the domestic automakers. In most cases, it was due to failures of management rather than the inability to design a good car or put one together right.
Consumer Reports needs to stick to compiling data and doing objective evaluations. They’re not “car guys” and they need to stop acting like they are.
I did some research on lemon laws and of course things are not as they seem. The law states the car must be out of service for 30 business days. Instead of being on day 23 it looks like I’m actually on day 15 (taking into account Christmas and New Years).
If it does hit 30 days VW requires I notify them by mail of my intention to file a claim under the law, and then I must file the claim through the BBB Auto Line. Everything goes through the BBB and VW corporate which will only drag the process out.
I was hoping you’d have a better update than that, Cell Guy. Crossing my fingers that you get your car back soon, too (and fixed up so it runs beautifully for the next 10 or so years).
I don’t want to get into the Dodge/Chrysler argument, but none of the 5 Chrysler group vehicles I’ve owned have almost left me stranded on the side of the interstate or been out of service for 3 weeks (and counting) because a part was not available. In fact the longest one of them was out of service was 2 weeks and that was due to a snowplow ramming into it at the hardware store (flipped it on it’s roof, only required some body work). If it weren’t for the amount of miles I drive I’d still be rocking a Dodge.
The 2012 Charger with the Pentastar V-6 and 8 speed transmission (slushbox :eek: :mad:) sure looks good right now.
I’ve got a Neon with 148,000 miles on it and it’s never stranded me either. and their reliability has gone up by leaps and bounds since the German shackles have been taken off.
I feel bad for you. My car died. It was a 2003 Chrysler 300M. Sort of sounded like the same issue. I was told it needed a whole new engine. Gah.
I replaced the CAM sensor and crank shift sensor in Feb 10. Parts covered for 1 yr. CAM sensor failed again. Wtf? And blah and blah and blah. And so they replaced stuff and tried to drive it and it died again. And it’s done for.
It was a terrible way to spend my winter break and I’m really stuck right now (how do I go to work on Thursday?) but I’d feel 10 THOUSAND times more pissed if the car were newer.
Because we would have appreciated it if someone had told us, do you know about replacing the seals on a Neon? As in, you don’t replace one, you replace them all at once? We replaced one, and another one was leaking by the time we got it home from the shop.
again, which ones? cam seals? valve cover gasket? front main seal? rear main seal? I had the cam seals done when the timing belt was replaced, but the mains are fine. My car uses essentially no oil between changes.
There are non-OEM camshaft sensors on the market that seem to have much higher failure rates. I replaced mine (it’s a Dodge Intrepid, same-ish car, same-ish engine, 2004) with one I got from the local parts store and it failed again within months. Ordered an OEM Chrysler unit that cost $20 more and no problems ever since. Should have just gone with the OEM from the start
That being said my camshaft sensor never killed the car, just set off the MIL and occasional made it hard to start, so maybe you’ve got more problems than me.
Bob Eaton at GM was the chief engineer of the X-platform cars (Chevy Citation, Buick Skylark, Pontiac Phoenix) that were basically the worst cars ever made. The front suspension was so awful that the car with a massive 70 horsepower 4 cylinder engine was a torque steer monster. In order to save $0.01 on brake pad material they somehow gave the car a rear brake bias that would send it into a spin under the slightest bit of hard braking. The handling was so bad that the NHTSA took GM to courty over it, it was literally a danger to public safety.
With an impeccable record like that, of course he became a CEO.
Sorry, I missed your second question. I’ll have to ask my husband which seals it was that we replaced - we did two, then his parents did at least one more after we sold the car to them. Here’s some talk about the head gasket problems.
