General Motors’ new midsize pickups, the 2015 Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon, have been shipping to dealers for only two weeks, but on October 2 GM halted their sale because of a pending safety recall to fix an airbag defect.
In a notification sent to its dealers, GM said it has notified the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of an upcoming recall to fix the airbag problem. According to the letter, the pickups’ driver-side airbag connections “were wired incorrectly during the manufacturing process,” a condition which “will cause the driver-side airbags to not function as designed and may adversely affect the crash performance of the driver-side airbags.”
(Dontcha just love how lawyers and engineers describe things: “May adversely affect the crash performance.”)
Dealers will be instructed to reprogram the airbag’s sensing and diagnostic module with new software, after which point customer deliveries can resume.
It was not stated how many Colorados and Canyons have been delivered to dealers from the factory in Wentzville, Missouri, nor whether all of them or only a portion will have to be recalled. But a GM spokesperson did say that most of the affected vehicles are being held at the assembly plant or are in transit or are on dealer lots, with just 49 of the pickups already in customers’ hands.
While a stop-delivery order of this sort could be embarrassing for GM as it launches these highly-publicized new vehicles, in light of the more than 2.6 million GM cars recalled for faulty ignition switches this year this recall may be seen as part of GM’s new approach to vehicle defects. General Motors CEO Mary Barra has said that going forward there will likely be a greater number of recalls, each affecting a smaller numbers of vehicles because problems will be dealt with earlier than in the past.
The ignition switch recalls have dominated the news, but in fact so far this year GM has issued 71 recalls totaling nearly 30 million vehicles overall For example, GM has recently announced recalls having nothing to do with ignition switches but affecting cars such as the Cadillac SRX, the Chevrolet Spark, and even the 2011-2012 Saab 9-4X SUV.
In truth, no new vehicle is free from recalls, but perhaps this quick recall on the Colorado and Canyon pickups is indeed evidence of a new attitude at GM.
Images selected from the General Motors Media Site.