The lousy economy is making planned obsolescence obsolete in the car business.
The auto industry is geared up to sell you a new car every four or five years -- a legacy of General Motors Corp.'s realization early last century that cars could be marketed as status symbols and fashion accessories. That insight helped GM end the reign of Henry Ford's utilitarian and durable Model T, and turbocharged America's post-World War II consumer culture.
Now, rattled by economic hard times, many Americans are heading back Henry Ford's way...
This survey was apparently on cars three years old, and the improvements have some definite value.
The surveys that were made with cars three months off the lot are all but worthless.
I heard an interview with Rick Wagoner the other day and it is clear he still doesnt have a clue. Lutz can and does speak with a straight tongue, and I believe people like him can help build trust in the products again, if he walks the walk.
Wagoner needs to get a job doing something he is good at.
JD Power has publicly stated that the Initial Quality numbers track very against Vehicle Durability Study numbers three years down the road. That's quite a bit better than "worthless".
You can't make a blanket statement like that with GM. For the past, oh, at least 15 years, GM has had some *very* reliable and enjoyable vehicles sold right alongside some clunkers. Most of the midsize/small front drives powered by the 60-degree v6 family are crap. Most of the larger front-drives (particularly Buick models) are excellent, as are all the Northstar powered vehicles. I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Cadillac (except that they've been butt-ugly for the last 5 years or more), a G8, or a GM truck or full-size SUV right now. But a Cobalt or G6 or similar? Screw that!
Everyone I know who has owned big Caddies in the last ten years has bailed in the last 4 or 5. Nothing but trouble - one thing after another - that the dealers cannot seam to solve. Might be OK for a year or two - but one friend had SEVEN Cadzillas in 5 years. Most spent more time in the dealer's garage than his. He's driving Lexus now and happer than a pig in you-know-what.
I hate to disagree as I LOVE Cadillacs but you are off base on this one. The NorthStar engines have huge head gasket problems and are failing at an alarming rate. The head bolt threads in the block fail and the bolts pull out. You are looking at a 3 to 4k dollar repair when (not if) this happens. Book time is somewhere around 25 hours. Supposedly the situation is much improved in 2003 and newer models.
Buicks are somewhat better overall but they have had a big problem with the egr pipe warping the plastic intake manifold allowing coolant to leak in to the engine. This one is supposedly fixed after the 2k model though I still hear a number of complaints on the issue.
According to most dealers the Northstar is NOT field rebuildable. And the head bolts are also the girdle bolts - to remove the heads the pan needs to come off if what I've been told by a guy I know who used to maintain a fleet of limos is true. NO local engine rebuilder will tough them with a 10 ft pole either
The EGR/plastic manifold problem is easily fixable and almost a non-issue after Series 2. But the 3800 still had issues, and the 3400 replacement? is a timebomb. Like the Northstar it's not a question of IF, but WHEN.
25 hours? I'm trying to imagine how this is possible -- how are the threads repaired? I can't imagine doing heli-coils would take anywhere near this long.
They are a complex engine jammed tightly into a cramped hood. Extremely difficult to work on. I was mistaken. the bolts to not go down to the bearing girdle - but they DO pull out tlike the headbolts on the Magnesium block VW pancakes (1500 and 1600 "suitcase" engines in particular) and the same type of "TymeSert" threaded bushing needs to be installed. I believe ARP has a different solutionusing larger head bolts as well. The originals IIRC are 11mm - a non-standard thread.
That's still pretty wild. I'm not familiar with the VW engine, so that description doesn't help much; a nonstandard thread might help explain the price, but not the 25 hours.
The top engine and intake area seem to be a problem for GM designers. I just helped my wifes's aunt find a replacement for her Oldsmobile - '94 IIRC - in which the plastic intake sprung an internal leak (maybe the EGR situation mentioned earlier?), and I just a month ago had to replace the intake gasket on my wife's '99 Century. An '88 Cadillac I had developed a pinhole leak in the intake-to-head mating surface. And on top of that, GM bought into the DexCool?/Prestone Extended Life? disaster. It should be a clue that they put coolant system leak sealer in at the factory on many of their engines.
I've been driving and owning many brands of vehicles for over 40 years, and have *never* once had anything but a GM have that type of problem in those areas, so it's not a matter of my doing something wrong or not maintaining them. Like I said - intake coolant porting and gasketing seems to be a very weak area for GM design.
I have no problem imagining it the way everything has to be so integrated on modern cars for compactness and weight - between consumer and government demands and regulations, to even hope to be competitive, the manufacturers have to cram 30 pounds of crap into the proverbial 5 pound bag. The consumer and the governments have gotten what they asked for/demanded along with all of the unintended consequences that create maintenance nightmares and multiple thousand dollar routine maintenance issues for the consumer. Welcome to the modern world.
The Northstar has been around for 17-odd years now, and I'm not going to deny it's had a share of quirks (block porosity allowing it to leak fluids right *through* the metal being one of the most, um, "interesting" problems). IIRC GM's grand plan was for the Northstar to become the one corporate engine line, and its early problems probably are what helped kill that idea. As for "no local engine rebuilder will touch them," that's probably somewhat true. Local engine rebuilders are all but *gone* except for supporting local racers and guys like me who restore their 40+ year old vehicles. With pretty much any thin-sleeved aluminum block engine, a complete rebuild is not cost-effective compared to getting a new or assembly-line rebuilt short block.
But back to the Northstar- the vast majority of them just *work* and work extremely well for years and hundreds of thousands of miles. When you do have to work on them, its a royal pain in some ways, but that's what you get when you make a 300+ horsepower lightweight v8 that can fit in a compact FWD vehicle. Packaging sucks- the starter is under the intake manifold, for example. We're not ever going back to the days of the Cadillac 472 where you could sit on the fender, reach down into its bowels and fix something while munching on a sandwich. Cadillac engines have had pretty complex and annoying service procedures since the 80s, but if you *follow* the published procedures instead of ASSuming that since a procedure worked on a Chrysler 318 its going to be the same on a Northstar, you can certainly maintain them just fine.
If you've ever tried to work on any Japanese car, you know that its the same story there. WORSE, in fact- at least GM doesn't put the PCV valve under the intake manifold like Toyota has done in the past! Pretty much the same for any modern vehicle- they just aren't built for simplicity of service anymore.
Yes, the whole comment pretty much fails the sanity check test. Of course so does the fact that I, whose very blood cells are shaped like little Chrysler pentastars, am defending GM. :-)
Where's the guy who went by "VioletLightning" when you need him to comment on Northstar service procedures? I guess he might still respond if this were in .tech, but I actually haven't seen a post from him in a long time.
The majority of the book time is because you can't do the job with the engine in the car and you can't pull the engine from the top... you have to drop the entire cradle out the bottom. Here's a step by step guide
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If you want to learn more about the problem visit
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There are a couple of really good NorthStar "stickys" at the top with a great discussion of the problem complete with pictures.
Perhaps I see them a bit more since I live in the land of the Blue Hairs but the pick and pull is overrun with these cars down here.
Particularly revealing to me was the survey of gasket/bolt failures at:
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Which clearly reveals that there was a rash of failures between 1997 and
1999, trailing off with none reported in their survey after MY 2003 (and only 2 in 2003).
Granted the sample size is small, but that's an AWFULLY clear trend!
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