We own (or at least will own outright in a couple of years) a 2005 Chevrolet Aveo. C bought it when she moved to Las Vegas and needed a car immediately, and this was both cheap and, more importantly, available (she wanted a Scion, but would’ve had to wait weeks at a time when she needed wheels right away). Frankly, I see few other redeeming qualities to it.
While pundits and politicians wonder why the Big Three are struggling to remain afloat, our Aveo clued us in.
Back on Thanksgiving Day, I drove to the airport to pick up my parents, and on our way back we stopped at a couple of grocery stores in search of Jones sodas. I noticed after one of the stops that when I started the car again, the radio was off, and I didn’t recall touching the power. So, I paid it little heed at the moment.
Later that night, my brother-in-law borrowed the car to take his lady friend home. Only he returned a couple of minutes after departing to inform us that the lock fell into the driver’s side door when he tried to put the key in. That’s right, the lock mechanism fell into the door panel, to rattle around indefinitely. It was still possible to lock the driver’s side door manually, with the door shut, but until we could get the lock fixed we were doomed to unlocking and locking the car via other doors. Inconvenient indeed. And, as my brother-in-law reconfirmed that the radio no longer worked. So, in one day not one but two things decided to crap out.
Needless to say, when we checked with the local Chevy dealer service department to see about getting the lock fixed, we received confirmation that the car was three months out of warranty. Fewer than 15,000 miles on the car, and it was already starting to cause problems. Relatively minor, trifling problems, to be sure, but nothing that makes me want me think another fine GM vehicle should be in my future.
We got the lock fixed a week later. It was just a matter of opening the door panel to reset the crappy metal lock, but it set us back a hundred bucks. Good grief. And they checked the radio and determined that it no longer works. I had instructed them not to replace it, since I had hoped it was just a lose wire (whenever I hit the power button to turn the radio on or off, a pop sound came through the speakers, followed by no sound whatsoever, which made me think it might just be a loose bit of wiring). They said it would cost $500-700 for a new GM radio. Obviously, as we knew and they recommended, we could get a radio aftermarket for a fraction of that price. But it’s absolutely ludicrous to think it would cost that much to replace a radio that is purely a radio. No cassette deck, no CD player, no MP3 player input. Just whatever crappy radio stations come through the equally crappy antenna. It wasn’t a big deal, since we have an FM iPod transmitter and thus can use the existing audio system to listen to our own digital music, but it’s absurd to think GM would charge that much for a (new) crappy radio.
Yeah, I’m not pleased with our car, and we’re without a functioning car audio system (excepting the underpowered iPod speakers that plug into the headphone port). But it seems like a convenient example of why we’d much prefer to own an Asian- or European-designed vehicle.
Springtime for Dubcek ... and Slovakia! 