I Knew It Wasn’t Right
November 1st, 2008 by ComputerBob
Five years ago, my wife and I traded in my Chevy Blazer and her old Saturn and bought 2 brand new Saturns for a special sale price of only $9995 apiece (USD). They’re just basic tranportation, but they’ve served us pretty well since then.
Except that even when they were brand new, I could tell that something wasn’t right with one of them. One car’s clutch started to engage as soon as you let the clutch pedal an inch or so off the floor, and was fully engaged an inch or two before it reached top of its travel. The other car’s clutch didn’t start to engage until it was several inches off the floor, and didn’t fully engage until it was at the very top of its travel.
It was disturbing, so after a few days, my wife and I took both cars back to the Saturn dealership, to show them how the two cars that were exactly the same year, make and model had clutches that acted completely differently. Their mechanics test-drove both of our cars and then assured us that both clutches were normal.
So we kept both cars, but ever since then, those clutch differences have made it a real challenge for my wife and me to to drive one car for awhile and then drive the other one — especially when switching from the one whose clutch barely engaged to the one whose clutch engaged right away.
Two nights ago, I discovered that my original suspicions were correct — I suspected that something was wrong with the clutch in one of our cars back when it was new, and now it was a lot worse. I was driving the one whose clutch has barely engaged for the past five years. While accelerating into highway traffic in 3rd gear with the clutch fully engaged. I stepped on the gas to accelerate into 4th gear. But before the car started to accelerate, the tachometer revved up for a second, as though I had pushed in the clutch pedal. I hadn’t. The clutch was slipping.
So yesterday morning, I made some quick phone calls and quickly took that car to a local garage. It needs a new clutch. The old clutch was worn out. I didn’t know how that could be possible, because I drive very cautiously and nearly every car I have ever owned had a clutch, including a brand new 1979 Plymouth Horizon that I drove for 146,000 miles before selling it to my brother-in-law, who drove it for tens of thousands of additional miles — and none of my other cars ever needed a new clutch.
The garage told me that the job would cost around $700 because Saturn clutches can only be bought from the Saturn dealer. That’s a lot of money, but I made a phone call and learned that the Saturn dealer would have charged over $1400 to do that same job.
But, a few hours later, after researching exactly which parts our car would need, the garage called and told me “the rest of the story.”
The reason the clutch wore out is because the hydraulic system that operates it was never strong enough to work very well. That’s why the clutch never fully engaged until the pedal was at the top of its travel. Knowing that, Saturn had quietly started using a stronger hydraulic system in their cars several years ago — apparently right between the time that they built our one car and the time that they built the other one.
And instead of issuing a recall of the cars that they had built with the weaker hydraulic system, they lied and told those of us who had bought the cars with weak hydraulic systems that everything was fine.
So instead of paying $700 to have the local garage replace only the clutch, I decided to pay an additional $300 to have them also replace the weak hydraulic system with the stronger sytem that has been working trouble-free in our other Saturn for the past five years.
Plus, I had to rent a car to go to my volunteer job yesterday. It cost me $34 to drive a total of 25 miles.
The way I see it, Saturn’s dishonesty five years ago is costing me over $1000 this weekend.
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Consumer Info, Engineering, Ethics, Personal