22nd Feb 2008, 14:53
Wow... my wife heard about one of these cars being for sale from a friend, and asked me to look up the model online. This story has me thinking we'll keep looking.
7th Mar 2008, 14:46
We bought a 2004 300 in March of 2004. It began shutting itself off at highway speeds almost immediately (600 miles on the gauge). Dealerships in three different states tried replacing fuses, the oxygen sensor, the entire wiring harness; nothing fixed the problem. 35,000 miles later, still experiencing the same problem, I finally had my own mechanic take a look at it. He informed me that at one point GM had apparently been installing the cheapest, sub-standard copper wiring in their engines, and that the problem would never be fixed. His advice was to sell the car while it still had any book value at all, since it had depreciated to less than 40% of sticker price in less than two years.
What really proved infuriating was that we contacted Saturn corporate headquarters when this first started. They were absolutely unwilling to replace the car, lemon laws or not, and offered only to give us book value trade in plus $1,000 off on another Saturn. My response to that is not printable in a polite forum.
I wouldn't own another American car, especially a GM product, if I won it in a raffle.
19th Mar 2009, 14:44
I haven't been to this site for a year, so pardon the delayed response to the response to my post of 3/16.
As indicated, this car was a lemon from day one. With all the visits to the dealerships that started (literally) less than a week after we took the car home, they never put any of them into their computer. When it became apparent that they had no idea what was wrong or how to fix it, I contacted corporate who referred me back to the dealer.
I do not expect any dealer to swallow depreciation, but when a $26,000 car is wrong from day one and the dealer can't fix it, I expect corporate (not the poor dealer) to offer me something more than $8,000 on a trade, and a second lemon to replace the first one. Remember, we're not talking some cosmetic defect here: this piece of junk persistently stalled at running temperature at high speed. My wife is very lucky she did not get run over by an 80,000 lb truck.
The silver lining is that my L-300 cured me forever of my desire to own an American car. As for GM's current problems, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.
9th Feb 2008, 02:01
Regarding the above comment... from personal experience, the orange "check engine/service engine soon" light does not always stay on until the computer is reset. It *should*, but I've had three different vehicles where the light has come on and then gone out while I was driving. However, the computer should indeed store trouble codes until it is reset, regardless of whether the light stayed on or not.