Road trip in an American made car

Early on I posted about trying to make sure our Buick Rendezvous was properly prepped for this road trip. We had it checked over to try and find anything that should be fixed prior to leaving so that we wouldn't have to deal with it while on the road. Well, it turns out there were a couple of items we didn't handle properly.

Problem one is related to the fact that global warming is experiencing implementation issues. We hadn't experienced any weather warm enough to want to use the air conditioning until we reached California. When we turned it on, nothing happened. RATS! Fortunately it hasn't yet been warm enough for that to be a problem, but we're headed to the southwest and we know that we'll need A/C for that. Fortunately we were planning to stay with our nephew for a few days so he made an appointment at a local shop to get it checked out. Of course, being a GM vehicle, it turns out that the repair is going to be expensive (Is there any other kind of repair for an american made car?). The shop found that the A/C evaporator sprung a leak. This is going to be the third evaporator for this car - the first one was replaced under warranty when the car was two years old.

Problem two is suspension related. For the last month or two it seemed like the car didn't ride as nice as it did when newer, but an inspection didn't reveal anything obvious. I suspected that the rear shocks were going bad, but they didn't exhibit any of the classic signs like oil leaking out. After checking into some prices for shocks and finding that they must be made from precious metals, we decided that they were good enough for now. After riding to California with a fully loaded vehicle, we realized that something had to get fixed or we would go crazy, so while the car was in the shop getting the A/C fixed, we decided to have shocks put on as well. We're hoping that improves the ride just a bit.

If any american car company execs happen to be reading this, please burn it into your brains that ultimate success comes from quality products, not slick marketing campaigns...

I really do want to support American car companies, but it's getting increasingly harder to do when I compare the long term reliability of my Japanese vehicles to that of my American vehicles. There's nothing more irritating to me than to be doing major repairs (for a second time) on a car with with less than 100K miles. grrrrrr....