Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyrotechnic
I'm wondering about it's past life. You know how employees treat company trucks. Run em as hard as you can without breaking them and pissing off the boss.  Wouldn't be surprised if that truck saw some amateur baja desert racing at some point. |
Yep, no doubt about that but I would still expect it to hold up better than it did. I work in the truck manufacturing business and about year and a half ago I was at one of the durability test tracks that GM uses in South Bend, IN (old Studebaker factory…now Bosch Proving grounds) where we had a status meeting on some delivery vans (non-GM vans) that were going through testing. GM happen to have a couple 1500 series trucks there going through cycles with the new 4.5L diesel (you know the small V8 diesel that didn’t get the approval for production yet) anyway, the track is brutal to say the least. Vehicles encounter more on that test track than they will ever see in real life. The test drivers literally drive with their seat belts OFF because the violent bouncing causes the seat belts to keep ratcheting the drivers tighter into the seats where they could lose control of the vehicle (on the vans anyway with the suspension seat frames). I actually had to hold my ball sack while riding shotgun in this van because some of the sections are so rough. Imagine running over a 50 yard stretch of pavers cemented to the road that are staggered and placed 2 feet apart at 25 MPH…..It is rough! And that was only one “event” as they called it. (You should have seen the GMT900 doors bottoms after an undisclosed time frame of continuous of salt spray testing...eek! Rusty, rusty...even the tester said the actual perforations happened quicker than expected...whatever that time was)
That said, I know GM goes through rigorous testing so my suspicion is GM saw these problems during their durability testing but chose not to address them in order to save money or they just figured by the time these issues would arise the trucks would have 300,000+ miles on them. None the less, a work truck that served 4 years and 100,000 miles in the desert shouldn’t fall apart like this even with a drunken Navajo Indian employee behind the wheel chasing coyotes or whatever.
Outside of GM Powertrain, my opinion is GM has lost their way with respect to full durability of their trucks (overall fit and finish, design engineering, substandard component specifications like sheet metal MIL thickness, serviceability, choosing substandard suppliers of components, etc). It is no wonder Ford is selling Stupid Duties like mad to the commercial world and Dodge is earning quick respect and gaining market share in the commercial side of the truck business like crazy. It seems GM is just the truck for retail customers to haul their jet skis to the lake or grab a sack of nails from Home Depot.
I have to tell ya...I am a major GM fan and GM fed me for years and helped my buy almost everything I have but, if I were to buy a brand new truck today....It sadly wouldn't be a GM.