New Member, Communication Problems

[Franki]

Hi All,
My 2011 LaCross CXL has been amazingly flawless - that is, until we were due to go on a road trip. Here's the TV news version: about three days before our departure I entered four destinations into the nav, without the motor running. The car sat in the garage until the morning we were to leave. We packed up, headed out about two blocks when I noticed the speedo, tach and audio/nav systems were dead. Nada. The car was running fine, but there were a lot of warning lights on the dash. We didn't know at what point the car would completely die so we pulled back into the garage (head in - a mistake) and took my wife's dependable, reliable, steady Toyota RAV4.
When we returned nine days later, the Buick was dead. Nothing. Called our local dealer, got it towed. Discovered you can't use a screwdriver in a slot to get the car out of park when there is no power. There is a cable that must be disconnected UNDER the car. Car turned around in the garage on dollies by tow truck driver with greasy hands.
The 'technician' at the dealer looked and looked for three days, without success. He could not find the problem, only saying 'the computers are not communicating to each other.' They must be married, said I. Dealer tried to blame the problem on a trailer hitch and wiring I had installed, so the wiring was removed.
Battery fully charged, I pick up the car and it was running just fine - until last Friday.
I think I may have left on a dome light. When I went to start the car it was dead. I mean dead. Nothing.
Called the dealer. Called a tow truck. Jumping the battery got a re-boot, some lights worked, but it would not run the starter. Car towed to dealer (again,after being turned around in the garage on dollies!). Yes, I will probably back in from now on.
Monday evening received voicemail from service mgr: still trying to find cause of problem, "car is not communicating with itself. Still investigating. Supposed to be communicating data, not voltage. Checking the combs (?) where the actual wires connect."
The tech has been on the phone with GMC experts.
So....that's the TV news version. Imagine if I had written a newspaper version.
Any thoughts? Oh, did search the forums for this problem. I also went back several pages to look for a similar subject heading.
Car is at 19,300 miles and still under warranty.
It's been great otherwise!

 

[Franki]

5:27 pm 8 May. Service Manager just called. Said they have traced the problem to the passenger seat presence module! It is a little module that is under the front passenger seat to detect whether or not someone is sitting in the seat. The challenge now is finding a replacement part.

 

[jimmyh]

I hope they get it sorted out for you. All the gadgets in these modern cars are great until one of them fails. That's when situations like yours happen.

I hope someday some car manufacturer decides to reverse the trend of over complication and start making cars simpler. Technology has gotten out of hand.

 

[InfiniteImp]

I hope someday some car manufacturer decides to reverse the trend of over complication and start making cars simpler. Technology has gotten out of hand.

Funny enough that was the same thing a friend said to me before I bought my 2010. More technology, more can go wrong. Looking back, he was right.

That said, I love the tech in these cars and it'll just get more and more involved as time goes on. There's no way they'll go back to the simplicity of past cars. People want the gadgets and safety features. Take something like the backup camera and proximity sensor. I lived without both for 40 years of my life, yet now that I've had them I know I want them on my next car.

Then take stuff like adaptive cruise control (front-mounted radar to automatically adapt cruise speed based on distance to the car in front of you), lane departure, etc. All useful safety features. Unfortunately this means that as car owners, we will be dealing with them not working at some point or another.

Since we know car manufacturers will not omit these features, and we know that at some point they will fail, what they need to do instead is design the software in the car to make it easy to diagnose and fix the issue, and design the car itself to make problems less likely (come on, GM, running wire bundles in such a way that they can ground out on the frame? What kind of a shortcut was that?!)

 

[Franki]

InfiniteImp...I agree wholeheartedly. I've always been a tech lover, but I have owned cars from a '49 Chevy coupe to a fully loaded BMW 550, and now the Buick. In the "good old days" a distributor could go bad, or a headlamp could go out. I believe the components of these computer driven vehicles are amazingly reliable. Technicians can often quickly pinpoint failures and problems simply by connecting the beast to a computer.

I just wish America would make it a lot harder to obtain and keep a driver's license. I'd like to see something to the licensing of private pilots. We blame collisions on everything but the driver ("bad road," the car)....