At the Chevrolet dealer to get the Buick fixed, I noticed that nobody was in there to buy a car.

At the Chevrolet dealer to get the Buick fixed, I noticed that nobody was in there to buy a car.

I went in for a 7 AM appointment over the squealing that “nobody could hear” at Anthony Buick or Car-X because it would stop doing it at the shop and then taunt me by being so loud you could hear me coming down the block as soon as I was on my way home from the shop, as car problems often play out.

This morning, I pulled into the service bay at City Chevrolet in Grayslake, Illinois, and revved the engine in Neutral with my foot on the brake just to be sure, and it goes SQUUUEEEEAL!!!! SQUEEAAAAAL!!! and the service advisor, Mr. Russ Corona, shouts “I heard it!”.

I shouted back, “Good! I was hoping someone would admit they heard it and I’m not crazy!”.

He was a nice guy. I hope they stay in business so I have a place to go that knows what’s going on with my car. These independent shops and chains seem to be getting a lot worse lately, sadly. Rushing you out even when you have money and want them to do a job.

Noisy car problems that go away as soon as you’re at the mechanic are like Harvey the 6 foot 3 and 1/2″ white rabbit, in that they’re ready to commit you by the time it’s over. The SQUEEAAAAL!!! The horrible SQUEAAAAL! CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP!!! SQUEEEAAAL!

So, apparently there was only one tensioner pulley for my car that was AC Delco in the Chicagoland area, and they had to send out for it at a Chevy dealer 85 miles away down in Joliet.

I noticed that there were quite a few people waiting on service for their car, but between 5 hours sitting there today (mostly because it took them 2 hours to drive down there for the part and back), and an hour or so the other day while they were doing some odds and ends, I have not seen one person come in to buy a Chevrolet.

Not that there are that many on the lot, mind you.

I had some recall services done on the 2003 Chevrolet Impala just because GM had to fix some parts and they ended up being the last places on that engine that oil was likely to leak from anyway. That was when they were Flag Chevrolet.

But when the COVID recession hit, they sold and got out of the Chevrolet franchise, and apparently it became City Chevrolet back in October, according to one of the salesmen.

Now, it could be me. I know people like to do shopping for cars and stuff online these days, but…..it was eery to see a bunch of car salesmen with no customers. They didn’t even seem to mind me poking around with the floor models. Getting in and going “Man, these things have gotten crazy with the buttons….”.

You know, the 2008 is the newest car I’ve ever owned outright. I had a 2018 KIA (financed) for about a year before my ex forced me into bankruptcy and I lost it, but even that didn’t have the sheer number of buttons to press as a Chevy does in 2022.

I noticed several things right off the bat. The paint quality looks terrible on most of the cars, the interior is usually cheap plastic. There’s absolutely nothing upscale about any of this. It doesn’t feel premium. It feels like a cheap KIA, but the cheapest new Chevy I saw there (a base model Equinox SUV, made in Mexico…..bet that’ll last) was nearly $30,000, and might be north of $30,000 by the time taxes and dealer nonsense gets added on.

The average was about $45,000 for a new vehicle, and the nicer ones, the trucks of course, were $50,000-$60,000. But the window sticker that said that the $60,000 Chevy Silverado was made in Mexico (LOL) also said that GM removed the heated seats…..but there’s still a button that doesn’t do anything…for the driver and the passenger.

And they compensate you….$50, for its removal.

You can add a shitty $3,000 package full of nonsense if you want to from the dealership, and most people are stupid enough to let the salesman talk them into it.

I personally despise “tech” stuff in my car, and you’d think that’s weird because I like tech stuff. But it does not age well in cars. Either it will fail completely in several years and cost a lot of money to fix, or it will become obsolete and nothing will even talk to it anymore. In some vehicles that came with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, where the owner based a major financial decision based partly on how well the car would integrate with their phone, the entire feature was removed later in an update they weren’t allowed to refuse.

Richard Stallman calls this the Universal Backdoor, where anything awful that it doesn’t do today can be added tomorrow. Or, to the contrary, something you want to use can simply disappear after you buy it.

Even the safety features suck. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (which should be labeled a terrorist group) successfully got Congress to pass a bill recently that will require you to submit to FACIAL RECOGNITION cameras in your cars after model year 2026, and the car will attempt to see if you’re tired or drunk and refuse to operate if so. We’ll see how that works and how people like it. Oh, you won’t have a choice, and you’ll pay for it too!

It’s not your grandfather’s GM, or even your dad’s GM. It’s Trump’s GM, where Trump NAFTA pretty much accelerated the shift of the American auto industry into Mexico, where there aren’t any strong labor or environmental laws.

Everything Trump did was poisonous, especially to his own voters. He put the UAW in the unemployment office, he had banks training loan officers to spot suicide warning signs in Wisconsin dairy farmers, then people honestly wonder why he lost those states.

The inventory at the Chevrolet dealer was maybe 5-8% of normal; most of the lot was empty. To disguise the fact that there were so few new vehicles to choose from, they parked the trucks sideways so that they would take up three parking spots. Just like their owners. Maybe it’s just good client management. I don’t know. Maybe they can paint handicapped signs on the parking spots as a form of suggestive selling.

But for some reason, there were no customers. Just salesmen walking around talking to each other for hours on end while I waited on them to grab the last tensioner pulley in all of Illinois down in Joliet. To read the “news”, at least the mainstream media, you’d think that people are so hot to buy a car that they don’t even care what the price is anymore, but what I saw was either the sign of an economic depression or the end of General Motors coming shortly.

According to the “official” statistics, used car prices are going up four times faster than new car prices. It’s very very hard to get an auto loan that’s not “subprime”. There’s predatory car lots that pretend to be tech companies like “Carvana” trawling for customers. They sell cars like mine to people pretty fast too. The only problem is that after the interest and insane markup, you’ll pay more than three times what I did and you still won’t have a better car than me.

Carvana has a fan club, and yet with financing a 2009 Buick Lacrosse CXL with 50,000 miles will run you over $14,000 plus interest. In my case, they offered me a lot of interest. Enough that it would have taken the car to $27,000.

I paid $7,950 for mine.

I don’t think anyone truly knows what’s unfolding in this country anymore. Well, strike that. Some people know, but they don’t admit it.

They know if people think too much about it, there will be executions in the streets.

Ronald Reagan actually told a Soviet joke in the late 80s that sounds a lot like America today.

He said that it took 10 years on the waiting list to get a car. So the guy showed up at the dealer to put down his deposit, and the salesman said “Great, you can come pick up the car 10 years from now.”. The man asks, “Morning or afternoon?”. The salesman looks at him, and asks, “What difference does it make? That’s in ten years!” and the man says, “I know, but the plumber is coming that morning.”.

If that was all that was wrong with things these days, it would be light punishment compared with how things are.