The clown fiesta that was replacing my broken headlights

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I love bright white lights. I replace all my indoor light bulbs with 4000K pure white bulbs because anything less than that feels yellowish and “unclean.” Naturally, I did the same with my truck—I replaced the stock halogen headlight bulbs with LED conversion kits with a color temperature of 6500K. That’s generally considered about the color temperature of sunlight; anything more and it starts looking more blue than white.

GMC Canyon at Mount Charleston

(Yes, I realize my headlights aren’t actually on in that photo, but it’s one of the pictures that I had conveniently available, and I didn’t want to go all the way downstairs and out into the residential parking garage to take a new photo just for this post.)

Unfortunately, the LED conversion kit has been a bit of a pain. When I first got them installed, they worked fine, but after a few months, the driver-side headlight randomly went out while I was traveling in California. When I took apart the headlight assembly and yanked out the LED conversion kit, I realized that the orb-like piece that actually emits the light was completely gone. I sent the photo in and requested warranty service, and CarID gave me a replacement conversion kit.

Broken headlight LED conversion kit

Another handful of months later, the passenger-side headlight went out… coincidentally, it was doing another California trip back in early July. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the GMC Canyon’s passenger-side headlight assembly is literally about 20 times more difficult to access than the driver’s side headlight assembly, so I literally didn’t bother trying to get it fixed until now. I don’t really drive around too much at night anyway, and on the one or two occasions that I did, I just drove around with one headlight and two fog lights on.

I have another California trip coming up towards the end of this week, so I wanted to get the broken headlight taken care of before I left for travel again. If things go as they historically have, another headlight is due to go out while I’m in California, and if I don’t repair the passenger-side headlight, then I will have no headlights driving around out-of-state. Also, while in California, I definitely will be driving around at night.

The LED conversion kit that I originally purchased off CarID was a few cents shy of $150, and it was a catastrophic failure of a product. This time, I decided to buy a much cheaper LED kit off Amazon from an Asian manufacturer (Asian manufacturers tend to make very cheap products that are sort of hit-or-miss—they are either absolute garbage or godlike good, and I’m obviously banking on these being godlike good). I ended up picking the BeamTech H11 LED Headlight Kit.

The driver-side headlight assembly is just a cover that you twist and open, but the passenger-side headlight assembly has two large plastic pieces block­ing access to the headlight. In order to even get in there, I needed a T15 screwdriver, which I did not have, so I bought the Powerbuilt 646017 Maxi-Grip Handle Star Screwdriver off Amazon along with my new headlights.

The two products arrived in the mail today, so it was time to get to work. The parking garage of the high-rise condo where I live isn’t very well-lit (nor do I think any parking garages on the Las Vegas Strip can really be considered “well-lit”), so I drove my truck up to the rooftop of the parking garage where it was uncovered and had direct sunlight. Luckily, I did this early enough in the day such that the temperature was only in the 90s Fahrenheit (Las Vegas has been under a heat wave lately and temperatures have easily gone over 110°F), but I was still dripping sweat by the end of this.

What ensued was a clown fiesta of things that literally should not have been possible.

Driver side Passenger side Result
CarID #1 CarID #2 Original configuration; driver side worked, passenger side did not
CarID #1 BeamTech #1 I replaced just the broken side and it still didn’t work
CarID #1 CarID #2 I put the seemingly broken bulb back in the broken side and it started flickering but wouldn’t stay on
CarID #1 BeamTech #2 I replaced just the broken side with the other new bulb and it still didn’t work
Empty CarID #1 I replaced the broken side with the bulb that was working in the driver side and it didn’t work anymore
CarID #1 Empty I put the working bulb back in the driver side and it stopped working
BeamTech #1 Empty I put one of the new bulbs in the driver side and it worked fine
BeamTech #2 Empty I put the other new bulb in the driver side and it still worked fine
BeamTech #2 BeamTech #1 I left the working driver side as-is and put the other new bulb in the passenger side, and it didn’t work
BeamTech #1 BeamTech #2 I swapped the two new bulbs on either side and both worked fine

Now keep in mind, the passenger-side headlight assembly is difficult to work with, and I couldn’t actually even get half the push screws out, so I was trying to manage my way through two massive bendy plastic protective pieces to even access the headlight connection each time. On top of that, in order to not get electrocuted, I was taking my keys out of the ignition each time I tested a new configuration, so I was literally pacing back and forth over ten times.

Ultimately, my headlights ended up working, seemingly out of sheer luck because the configuration that ended up working definitely was not logical based off my series of trials.

Hopefully the California gods don’t smite one of my headlights this time around so I won’t have to go through all this all over again.

 

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There’s a class action lawsuit against General Motors for their 8-speed automatic transmission

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Back in July 2018, I bought a new GMC Canyon as my first personal vehicle. I was very fortunate that I was able to get the exact vehicle that I wanted, as I perceived the GMC Canyon as essentially the best-in-class vehicle that fit my exact needs. I took my enjoyment of the vehicle to the next level and also added on a handful of modifications.

This isn’t quite the best photo, but it’s the only one I have handy that hasn’t been posted on my blog before (but you can find more pictures in other blog posts):

Making a stop at the Grewal Business Center in Baker, CA after driving through the Mojave Desert from Las Vegas in a rainstorm

Unfortunately, a few months after purchasing the truck, I started having some problems with the transmission. At the time, I didn’t really know what was wrong, but I new something was definitely abnormal, because I had driven a lot of vehicles before, especially considering that I’ve done enough car rentals for work to earn myself elite status with Enterprise Rent-A-Car. In my half-year owner’s review, I mentioned this problem; here’s an excerpt from that blog post:

The transmission is slow and lurches the vehicle when the fluids are still cold. There’s an option to display transmission fluid temperature in the gauge cluster, and whenever it’s below ~100°F, the transmission takes longer to shift to different gears. This is particularly noticeable when you’re just starting up the vehicle and making your first stop of the day. If you do not come to a complete stop then wait a few seconds (and instead just slow down and roll through a stop sign), the vehicle will hiccup and lurch when you ease your foot off the brake and begin accelerating again.

When I took it into the dealership, they did no work on it and sent it right back to me with the commentary, “Performed complete vehicle DTC scan. No codes or service bulletins found. Could not duplicate concern. Vehicle is operating as designed.” At that point, I wasn’t sure if the mechanic had someone else warm up the vehicle and transmission fluid so much that the problem went away, he was just incompetent and didn’t recognize the problem, or he was intentionally ignoring the blatantly obvious problem.

 
Yesterday when I got back from hiking, I was browsing the Internet while recovering and came across a class action lawsuit against General Motors, the manufacturer of the GMC Canyon. I got curious and looked into it, seeing as I am a General Motors customer, and got extremely intrigued when I saw that it was regarding a defect in the 8L90 and 8L45 8-speed automatic transmissions. Apparently, the vehicles affected were:

  • Chevrolet Colorado, Chevrolet Silverado, Chevrolet Camaro, Chevrolet Corvette
  • GMC Canyon, GMC Sierra, GMC Yukon
  • Cadillac ATS, Cadillac CTS, Cadillac CT6, Cadillac Escalade

At this point, figurative red and blue lights were flashing in my brain as I began digging through my vehicle’s purchase paperwork. Lo and behold, my 2018 GMC Canyon had an 8L45 transmission and was an affected vehicle for this class action lawsuit. According to the “GM facing class action lawsuit over transmission problem” page on ClassAction.org, the problems that others are having are the same as mine:

“When a driver accelerates or decelerates, the cars will reportedly hesitate and then shudder, jerk, clunk, or ‘hard shift’ when the automatic transmission switches gears. This may also occur when the vehicles are accelerating in a single gear and not necessarily switching gears.”

I got in touch with one of the class action lawyers, and I’m in talks with them right now providing relevant information, so hopefully this ends up doing something for me. Even though the transmission sucks, I still really like the truck, and I’ve already put in a good chunk of money modifying it to my desires, so it’s not like I want to completely bail out and get rid of the truck. Ideally, I just want to avoid a situation where I ding 60,001 miles, my powertrain warranty ends, and my transmission proceeds to immediately implode.

 

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2018 GMC Canyon & AutoNation GMC Henderson: ½-year owner’s review

This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Do I still adore my truck? Yes.

As much as I did before? No.

Making a stop at the Grewal Business Center in Baker, CA after driving through the Mojave Desert from Las Vegas in a rainstorm

Back at the end of July 2018, I purchased a 2018 GMC Canyon mid-size pick-up truck from AutoNation GMC Henderson. I’ve owned the truck for just over 7 months now, and here are the experiences I’ve had owning the truck.

  • The seat is incredibly uncomfortable for long-distance driving. I have the SLE model (yes, I am sure it is the SLE, it’s just that the exterior is modified to look like the all-terrain) and it does not come with lumbar adjustment. I’ve been on multiple trips across the Mojave Desert from Las Vegas to Southern California and back, and I usually have noticeable back pain if I don’t stop a few times to take a break and stretch my back.

    I’ve resorted to sitting half cross-legged – that is, I take my left shoe off and fold my left leg under my other leg to give my lower back a stronger base of support – to ease the pain during long-distance driving. I’ve also tried a variety of different lumbar pillows, but none of them seem to fit just right.

    If you also have lower back problems, I would recommend either purchasing a different truck (I’ve driven between Las Vegas and Southern Cali­fornia in both the Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier via rentals from Enterprise, and I’ve had no back problems with either of those trucks) or upgrading to a higher trim with adjustable lumbar support.

  • Right around 4,380 miles on the odometer, the vehicle just randomly shut off with no warning while I was driving. Luckily I was cruising at approximately 20 MPH (30 KPH) because I had just turned out of my cousin’s neighborhood, but I noticed that the accelerator had stopped working, and when I checked to see what was going on, I saw that the vehicle was off.

    I continued cruising to the side of the road, stopped, put the vehicle in park, removed the key normally as if I was turning off the engine, waited several seconds, then started the vehicle again, and it worked perfectly fine. I’ve driven a couple thousand more miles since then and haven’t en­coun­tered the problem again.

    I brought the vehicle to the dealership to get it checked up, but the mechanic could not find any error codes in the history, and he was unable to replicate the problem (which was expected, seeing as I had already driven about 2,000 miles since the issue without the vehicle randomly dying again).

  • The transmission is slow and lurches the vehicle when the fluids are still cold. There’s an option to display transmission fluid temperature in the gauge cluster, and whenever it’s below ~100°F, the transmission takes longer to shift to different gears. This is particularly noticeable when you’re just starting up the vehicle and making your first stop of the day. If you do not come to a complete stop then wait a few seconds (and instead just slow down and roll through a stop sign), the vehicle will hiccup and lurch when you ease your foot off the brake and begin accelerating again.

    This problem did not happen right away, but became an issue a few months into ownership. After a few months, it happened with a 100% replication rate. Unfortunately, when I took it to the dealership for warranty service, the mechanic said that he could not recreate the problem, and said that the transmission is working as intended. The worst part about it is that it literally only happens after the vehicle sits overnight and completely cools down, so because the mechanic had already driven the vehicle earlier in the day, I couldn’t just get into the truck and show him myself.

    I plan on bringing the vehicle back for warranty service, though I need to figure out a strategy to actually show the problem to the mechanic my­self (which will be difficult unless I literally drop off the truck, use rideshare service to come back home, use rideshare service to go back to the dealership the next day, then drive the truck with the mechanic in the passenger seat the next morning on a cold start).

  • The climate control was fickle and often would not fully shut off, even though the center console claimed it was off. As a result, I couldn’t just set the temperature to very cold or very hot, blast the climate control until it was a comfortable temperature, then turn it off. Instead, I had to actually select exactly what temperature of air I wanted, because even in the “off” position, it would still blow out air of that particular temperature.

    The mechanic apparently forgot to write comments about this problem after bringing it in for warranty service, but after I tried to recreate the problem, it no longer happened, so I presume that they ended up finding some problem somewhere and fixed it.

  • The dealership, AutoNation Buick GMC Henderson, was great right up until my actual warranty service began. My salesperson was awesome, and my service consultant was probably the only service consultant I’ve ever seen who seemed like they actually cared about the customer. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, I’m extremely dissatisfied with the mechanics.

    Not only did they fail to recreate a very basic transmission problem, even though I went as far as to drop off my truck and let it sit at the dealership overnight so they could drive it from a cold start, but for whatever reason, they decided to disconnect my dash cam part-way through servicing my vehicle. This was apparent far before I actually looked at the footage – I knew right away because, when they reconnected it, they didn’t even bother mounting it properly again, and instead left it dangling by the wires from the headliner (I have the dash cam hardwired).

    As far as I’m aware, the only reason to actually disconnect a dash cam then literally mention nothing about it when I went to pick up the truck (and also leave no mention about it in the service notes) is if they were up to something suspicious that they didn’t want me to know about. There’s another AutoNation GMC on the other side of the Las Vegas Valley, and I’ll likely end up taking my truck to the one on Sahara for a re-check on the transmission problem, hoping that the mechanics there know what they’re doing and opt to not disconnect my dash cam (or at least tell me if they need to).

So, do I regret the purchase of a GMC Canyon? Absolutely not. But would I do it again? … Absolutely not.

My decision was a toss-up between the Toyota Tacoma and the GMC Canyon; the Canyon won because it had substantially better styling for the price (both on the exterior and interior) as well as interior luxuries and conveniences. With the mid-size pick-up truck segment evolving with vehicle redesigns in the coming few years, I’m hoping that Toyota can up the quality of the Tacoma enough that it becomes the leader in the segment in both looks and reliability.

As for my Canyon, I was originally planning on keeping it for about a decade – and if I had gotten a Tacoma, I almost definitely would’ve kept it for a decade, as those things tend to run buttery smooth for a long, long time. However, at this point, with electric vehicles poising to take over the market, I’m almost glad that I have a semi-unreliable vehicle, as it will likely encourage me in the next 4-5 years to just trade it in and upgrade to an electric pick-up truck (while if I had a Tacoma, I would likely hold onto it forever).

 

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Visiting my aunt and uncle in the mountains

This post is over 5 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

With BlizzCon Opening Week and BlizzCon 2018 coming up, I’m back in California to do press and media coverage of the convention. I drove from Las Vegas to Southern California a little bit earlier than originally anticipated because I had some tasks to take care of, but that extra time in California meant I got to do some other stuff as well.

One of my aunts and uncles from my dad’s side of the family live in Southern California up in the mountains. I’m usually not a huge fan of driving to their home there because there are a lot of winding unpaved roads on the climb up, but since I got a pick-up truck a few months ago, I decided to try out the drive again. In the past, my drives up and down were moderately intimidating because I was in tiny, short rental vehicles with poor engine power, but the drive up this time felt like a breeze.

GMC Canyon pick-up truck in the Santa Ana Mountains

Full album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamparkzer/sets/72157674963463678

 

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Caw caw caw

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My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

📍 Grewal Business Center in Baker, CA

Caw caw caw

Rest stop at the Grewal Travel Center in Baker, CA while driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles

 

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My truck’s first full foam bath and auto detail

This post is over 6 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

The drive through the Mojave Desert between Southern California and Las Vegas is surprisingly taxing… to the exterior of my truck. My truck has actually managed to stay pretty clean in general, but one trip to and from California usually results in massive amounts of dirt and mud sprayed and caked onto the side near the wheel wells.

Because these trips have been for work purposes, I have been getting reimbursed for mileage, and the mileage reimbursement is technically supposed to cover all different aspects of operating the vehicle – fuel, depreciation, maintenance, insurance, and more. Although maintenance usually refers to repairing issues that may arise with the vehicle, I figured that maintenance could also mean maintaining the exterior appearance of the vehicle. So, I took my truck to get its first full foam bath and auto detail today.

And of course, like how a proud parent would film their baby’s very first bath, I filmed my truck’s very first bath as well (courtesy of On the Spot Mobile Detail):

First full foam bath and auto detail

The detailing session was finished up with some tire polish and interior cleaning:

Auto detailing by On the Spot Mobile Detail

After foam bath and auto detailing

It’s obviously far more cost-effective to get my own little portable vacuum and a stack of microfiber rags to do the interior cleaning portion of this myself (which I will definitely be doing from now on), but seeing as this was my truck’s first bath, I decided to spoil it a little bit.

 

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