I had some annoyong problems with my HHR (PAL, brakes, other junk) so being a squeaky wheel (pun partially intended) I sent an email to the vice chairman of GM. Guess what? Within a day he wrote back, put his top guys on it and they took care of every single problem on my car...ON THEIR DIME. You would have thought I was someone who had clout or who mattered when the truth is I am absolutely nobody.

I can't imagine another car company doing that for me. GM took care of me like family, treated me like a superstar and now I will always stay in the GM family.

 

Good to hear they took care of you.
Too bad you had to go to that level of management, but sometimes you have to do that.
And GM keeps another customer.

 

Can you tell me what was wrong with your PAL and how they fixed it?

Mine is so slow as to be unusable.

 

A few problems, Orange. Mostly it was installed in the XM port and that caused a big problem with unwanted XM commercials breaking through. Even after I RTFM, it's obvious that the design of the item is so poor that searching for songs is MADDENINGLY slow and there's nothing that can be done about that. The part overrides the iPod's search ability (for no good reason cause the one in my BMW did not do that) so you have two options. One is to create lots of playlists which would make the search only slightly less maddening or pop for a $5 cable and play your iPod out of the AUX port on the front of the radio so you can still use the search function. It won't charge the iPod like the PAL will and you won't have steering wheel controls but you'll be able to search easier and you can always switch back and forth between PAL and aux.

Not a solution a workaround but it's designed poorly and there's not much else you can do about it.

 

The problem with the PAL was caused by a common issue with the part and an '06 HHR which I have. They needed to reflash the XM and GM sent in one of the top engineers to solve the issues with it. Now it works as well as it can.

 

So WHO exactly did you write to? I want to send him/her an email about something to make the HHR better and very much needed. THANKS!!

 

Bob Lutz is my guess. He does answer all his own E mails.

boblutz@GM.com

His answers are short but he will personally reply.

 

That is not his email address; it bounced. Do you have another one?