wrong things with my 2018 Malibu

 2018 Malibu problems

About I bought this car with 17,000 miles on it. I bought it from a family member and it looked like it had rolled straight off of the showroom floor. There were no tiny sand scratches or dinks of any kind in the paint anywhere the windshield look brand new. The thing looked like somebody had driven it around on an indoor track for 17,000 miles. It had no stains the floor looked completely brand new. It still had the warranty on it which turned out to be fortunate. 

Immediately it appeared that the shifter the gear shifter did not work properly when shifting into the manual gear selection mode. The way it worked on this car was you could shift the stick shift into a mode where you push the button repeatedly to pick the top gear. It had six speeds, so you could set it to one through six. If you picked three it would automatically drive in gears 1 2 and 3. So when you got going very fast the engine would be winding up pretty high. If you picked six then the car drove just like it was in normal drive. It would use all six gears. Well this one didn't work right. When you shifted into manual mode the highest gear you could select was 4. So they worked on it once and said that it was fixed and when I got it back and start driving it it worked exactly the same. So I took it to a different dealership and they argued with me about how it was supposed to work in the first place. But I stuck it out, I said look on the internet that's not how this one works it doesn't just automatically stay in one gear it goes in whatever gear it needs to go to to drive the car but it's limited to the top gear you pick. So the service manager went and looked it up they got it fixed it came out a couple hours later and told me I was right and he said here's your car back. I took it for a drive and it worked fine. So that was warranty work didn't cost me any money but it took two trips to different dealerships to get it fixed.

After driving it 12,000 miles, while on a road trip, it suddenly decreased in power about 80%. A warning light on the dash came on and a message came on the console that said engine power reduced get maintenance. Fortunately it was about 10 mi back to a dealership. That appears that all this was timed by God and this giant massive computer simulation that God's got us all running in. If it happened out in the middle of the country I basically would have been stranded. It would have taken me hours to get into some town and the nearest town wouldn't have had a dealership. But this town did have a dealership. And I could tell it was also from Jesus because they were able to fix it while I waited in about 2 hours and I was back on the road. So what it turns out is that they put so much incredible technology into these things that it's almost impossible for them to make everything work at six sigma. Because if this car had been totally manufactured at six sigma it would have never broken at 30,000 miles. That would be impossible. So this particular design flaw is that they have put 4 camshaft sensors and two solenoids on top of the head to help adjust the intake and exhaust camshafts to work in concert with the turbocharger. These sensors appear to be incredibly sensitive and to some degree finicky. I use only mobile one oil in this vehicle and still even the tiniest bit of any kind of residue in the oil will affect the sensors and make them intermittently fail. So that replaced that one but about 30,000 miles later another one went out. It's interesting though two of the sensors are fairly critical and will cause the car to lose 80% power. The other two sensors are not quite as critical and only cause the car to lose about 10% power. So the next sensor that went out was one that only causes the cartilage about 10% power. So I just kept driving it and eventually the light would turn off and the power would return to normal. That's how finicky these sensors are. Not six sigma. Six sigma means that you could pretty much clog them with sand and dirt and they would still keep working. But these if you get even microscopic dust so small that it takes an electron microscope to see them then the thing quits working right. That's not six sigma.

The next problem is the windshield wiper blades. These are without a doubt the worst windshield wipers I've ever had. I had a 1969 VW squareback. The windshield wipers worked great, if they had just stuck some 1969 VW squareback windshield wipers on this car it would have been fantastic. But instead they stuck some futuristic super high tech windshield wipers on there that wouldn't freaking wipe the water off the windshield. It was a well-known problem you can look it up on the internet. Six sigma? Don't make me laugh.

The next problem is that it had an active noise reduction system. When you fill the trunk up with stuff like I did on one trip it causes the noise reduction system to make a loud humming noise that sounds like there's a giant hole in the muffler. The very first time it happened I actually thought there was a semi in my blind spot that's how loud it was. There was this huge noise like a giant semi downshifting. It kind of freaked me out. Now it's intermittent and doesn't happen all the time and in fact it's fairly difficult to reproduce at random so I ran into the dealership and they drove it around carefully trying to reproduce the problem but not. I couldn't reproduce it for them either so I just continued on my trip. I later read about this also on the internet.

Now having been fairly critical of the vehicle it's time to tell you the good stuff about it. The car was a blast to drive. It had a top speed of 130 mph and it cruised right up to 120 miles an hour without any problem. You could cruise at around 90 miles an hour on the highway with the thing fully loaded down full of stuff in fact everything that I owned was in that car and I could still drive 90 miles an hour comfortably. The car handled like a dream it handled better than sports cars used to handle back in the 70s. The thing was peppy but not super powerful. It got fantastic gas mileage it would routinely get over 40 miles to the gallon on the highway even at 80 miles an hour. Well there was one day when I only got 28 miles to the gallon on the highway at about 85 but that was an exception. It was fantastic to drive and I drove it 90,000 miles. It never broke down and had to be towed but like I said above it did have some problems. The interior was fantastic the electronics were fantastic the sound system was incredible air conditioner and heater was adequate it was just a wonderful all around vehicle. It was comfortable it was fun it had great styling. Thank you Jesus for all the good stuff and somehow thank you Jesus for all the not so good stuff.