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.

(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.

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.

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.

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):

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.

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):

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

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.