Towed To Dealer after 2 weeks 351 miles

[Collimare]

I just got the worst phone call from the dealer that I can imagine. They got the key out of the night box, unlocked it, started it up and drove it around the building into the service bay. Then later the service manager gets in it and drives around the block a couple of times. They are running diagnostics.

The car was totally dead and inoperable yesterday morning. Door would not unlock from fob or door handle. I watched the tow truck driver take the cap off the handle and open the door with the hard key. Once inside he tried to operate the car and it was dead. With his jumper box attached it would not start. He was only able to get it to go into neutral. When he was ready to pull it up onto the flat bed ramp he could no longer get it to go into neutral and had to drag it onto the truck.

The dealer goes out, starts it and drives it like nothing ever happened. I cannot own/drive a car that intermittently for no apparent reason yet is going to leave me stranded or worse leaves me with the fear of it every time I drive it.

This is just stupidly unbelievable. I am absolutely livid at this point. They had better find a real, substantiated and documented problem that they can fix with actual replacement parts.

[LeftieBiker]

This could be a 12 volt battery failure that isn't total. In the world of the Leaf, that would be called "Tuesday."

[paulgipe]

This is exactly what happened to me a week ago. Even less miles. I will post my experience on a separate thread. Even had the problem with the skids. The guy showed up w/o the dolly.

Is your battery Korean or German? Mine is Korean. It was 3.7V when I measured it.

No problem found.

[SeanNelson]

Is your battery Korean or German? Mine is Korean. It was 3.7V when I measured it.

No problem found.

Was that a typo and meant to be "13.7V"? Because if it was really 3.7V then it would definitely be a "problem found"...

[Collimare]

This is exactly what happened to me a week ago. Even less miles. I will post my experience on a separate thread. Even had the problem with the skids. The guy showed up w/o the dolly.

Is your battery Korean or German? Mine is Korean. It was 3.7V when I measured it.

No problem found.

Paul,

So they gave it back, "no problem found" and you are driving it??

I never really looked at the battery. I just can't believe this with a brand new car. So if two out of us on this forum have had the exact same thing how many others are having the same?

It just seamed like more than a mere defective battery. If the battery is truly defective and it is low enough to not operate the locks I don't think in 24 hours it is all of a sudden perfectly normal. Sounds more like a thermal interlock kicked in and then cooled to a reset or something along that line. We have such a feature in our product but it will tell you when it happens. Perhaps they should keep mine to give to one of the engineers to drive as a research project and give me a new one.

[devbolt]

You are right to be pissed that OnStar and the tow company they sent gave you subpar service. And that the dealer is not being as informative as to what is going on with car. But you are not going to get a new Bolt to drive while they use yours to diagnose a what appears to be a problem with the 12V system. It’s not practical from a logistical or financial point of view, for either the dealer or the manufacturer. No lemon law in any state would support a buyback of the car at this time. Certainly not for a failed 12V battery.

[Collimare]

You are right to be pissed that OnStar and the tow company they sent gave you subpar service. And that the dealer is not being as informative as to what is going on with car. But you are not going to get a new Bolt to drive while they use yours to diagnose a what appears to be a problem with the 12V system. It’s not practical from a logistical or financial point of view, for either the dealer or the manufacturer. No lemon law in any state would support a buyback of the car at this time. Certainly not for a failed 12V battery.

You are absolutely right. Why would they when they have willing customers to do it for them. The issue(s) is more than a simply bad 12V battery. I truly hope they find the actual cause so I can have piece of mind driving my new Bolt.

I did get a new Volt loaner this morning. I am jealous that it has a nice lit charging compartment when you open the charge door. My 2013 did not and I have already been thinking of how to add some type of light to the Bolt charge compartment. A timed LED that comes on for a 5 seconds and goes off each time the door is opened.

[devbolt]

You are right to be pissed that OnStar and the tow company they sent gave you subpar service. And that the dealer is not being as informative as to what is going on with car. But you are not going to get a new Bolt to drive while they use yours to diagnose a what appears to be a problem with the 12V system. It’s not practical from a logistical or financial point of view, for either the dealer or the manufacturer. No lemon law in any state would support a buyback of the car at this time. Certainly not for a failed 12V battery.

You are absolutely right. Why would they when they have willing customers to do it for them. The issue(s) is more than a simply bad 12V battery. I truly hope they find the actual cause so I can have piece of mind driving my new Bolt.

I did get a new Volt loaner this morning. I am jealous that it has a nice lit charging compartment when you open the charge door. My 2013 did not and I have already been thinking of how to add some type of light to the Bolt charge compartment. A timed LED that comes on for a 5 seconds and goes off each time the door is opened.

I’ve had the battery in my Highlander Hybrid go flat twice in the last two years. In one of the cases it was because the car sat unused in the driveway for 4 weeks, and we kept walking past it with the key fob which kept “waking it up”, which probably caused a larger than expected vampiric drain on the battery. Did I take the car to Toyota and demand a replacement Highlander while they figured out why the battery drained? No, I charged the battery up and made sure to be a little more careful with how long I let the car sit in between uses. Haven’t had a dead battery in quite some time.

You and I don’t know what the problem is with your Bolt’s 12V system. Could be a bad battery. Could be a bad line of code that is failing wake up the 12V charging system periodically. Could be some subsystem that isn’t properly powering down when you turn off the car. GM doesn’t have the engineering resources to dedicate to find out the problem for your specific Bolt. They just can’t take it and drive it around and hope to replicate the problem. What they do have resources to do is to collect data from trouble reports from owners and dealers and start drawing correlations and possibly setup test cases to replicate the problem using their test fleet. There’s nothing more frustrating to engineers and end-users alike as an intermittent problem that is hard to replicate.

I, too, am jealous of the Volt’s lit charging port. Rumors are that the Bolt is supposed to get a similar lit port and that a retrofit kit will be made available for early Bolts. Supposed to be a $250 part/kit.

[Collimare]

GM doesn’t have the engineering resources to dedicate to find out the problem for your specific Bolt.

That is the most interesting statement I have read in a long time. So GM has no responsibility to repair my "specific" intermittent problem until they are able to identify the problem through crowd sourced statistics. Really??

If GM ultimately cant find the specific problem(s) for my new Bolt in a timely manner then they can replace it.

I am curious about the potential safety/liability of the car being found dead and inoperable by the tow truck company and then without any external intervention the car all of a sudden is found by the dealer the next day to have full power restored.

[devbolt]

That is the most interesting statement I have read in a long time. So GM has no responsibility to repair my "specific" intermittent problem until they are able to identify the problem through crowd sourced statistics. Really??

If GM ultimately cant find the specific problem(s) for my new Bolt in a timely manner then they can replace it.

I am curious about the potential safety/liability of the car being found dead and inoperable by the tow truck company and then without any external intervention the car all of a sudden is found by the dealer the next day to have full power restored.

I take it that in your 30 years of owning cars you’ve never had a 12V battery suddenly die? Never accidentally left an interior light on in the car? Forgot to turn the headlights off? Because so far what it sounds like happened is your 12V battery did just that. The computers in these cars don’t like it when the 12V battery gets low. Makes them throw all sorts of erroneous error codes that have nothing to do with what is actually wrong with the car.

GM has a responsibility to make a good faith effort to fix your vehicle in a timely manner. That timely manner varies from state to state. The number of attempts to repair the specific problem also varies from state to state. In California, they have three attempts to fix the same specific problem. They also have a 30-day clock. Which means that the car can’t be out of service (i.e in the shop) cumulatively more than 30 days. Once the car has been in the shop for more than 30 days, it’s buyback time. Same with failing to fix the same specific problem three times. You are just at attempt number 1. I wouldn’t start contemplating a buyback situation until the second time it happens, especially if they end up replacing the original 12V battery as a precaution.

You seem to be getting all bent out of shape and ready to force the dealer and GM to buyback the car before they’ve had a chance to really examine things. The original tone of your post made it sound like you wanted them to give you a replacement Bolt right then and there and a GM engineer had to come out to Colorado and take your Bolt and drive it around until the problem happened again so they could figure out what was the specific problem. You are also insisting that they better find a real problem and fix it with replacement parts or else. What happens if it turns out to be a one-off glitch and it never happens again? Will you still insist that they have to fix or replace the car?

I totally get that you are upset that the car is having problems after only 350 miles. It doesn’t help that OnStar was unhelpful/clueless and that the tow truck driver was a moron. And you have have every right to be upset because of all that. I would be livid, too. But before you start contemplating the nuclear option (buyback), take a step back, breathe, and give the dealership and GM a chance to make things right.