I'm afraid you are at the mercy of the dealer on this one my friend! Other than electrical/computer diagnostics there is no service information available to the aftermarket. I am a professional repair technician and I can't even get a parts list for your roof system. You now know WHY the previous owner wanted to sell the car!
I really wish I had a good answer for that but just to be honest with you, I don't! It is difficult to find anyone at the dealership that has worked on many of the things that go wrong on higher mileage vehicles. (By this, I mean any vehicle that is beyond it's factory warranty period.) Although many people believe that the dealer has ALL the answers (but charge too much for them) this simpl is not the facts. Yes, it is true that they have ALL of the parts information. They also have ALL of the service and repair information available to them. The problem is that many of the things that go wrong with higher mileage vehicles are rarely ever seen by dealership technicians. They simply do not have the EXPERIENCE to deal with most of them. Probably 85% of all the work performed at the dealership repair shop is repetitive. These are KNOWN problems that occur on certain models. A very high percentage of these problems will have a Technical Service Bulletin published by the manufacturer to tell the technicians what to do when these problems do come up. It is hard to find a dealership technician that actually actually has experience in dealing with the many parts of your vehicle that tend to fail outside of this "box".
Then there is the aftermarket dilema...Those like me that have a LOT of experience in dealing with problems that occur when vehicles are out of warranty. The problem here is that the manufacturer refuses to release certain information to the aftermarket because they are trying to FORCE you back into the dealership. As a result, you end up with a vehicle that NOBODY can fix and you are then FORCED to purchase a new vehicle. I could go on about this for days....
I WISH I had a better answer for you.
Also take a moment to check ot the web site at [ righttorepair.org ] This is the web site for the Right to Repair Coalition. This is a group of people that are trying to pass legislation to help stop people from having to deal with the problems you are experiencing now. Their site is very informative and may open your eyes to a lot of things you haven't given much thought to.
One choice that I can suggest is to find a similar vehicle in a salvage yard and use the parts from one to restore the other. Many salvage yards are members of used parts "networks". One salvage yard may be able to find the parts for you in another savage yard clear across the country. If you have a list of the part numbers that you need, the possibilities change a lot. There is a good chance that you may be able to "google" each part number and see what pops up. There are many vendors online that "buy-up" old dealer stock and sell it from their warehouses via the internet. I have found many "obsolete" and "hard to find" parts this way. I have even purchaced hard to find used parts from Amazon after doing a search using the part number.
×
160 views
Usually answered in minutes!
How would I find a reputable Dealer that really has the ability to fix this at a reasonable price?
Thank you dttech for your informative answer. Actually today I got the price list of missing parts and indeed it came to $5700! I was given the GM part number and group and description and price and I am wondering if there is a place to buy these parts instead of going directly through GM or a GM dealer?
PS You were right, they said I might as well trade it in on a new one since the present value is probably around $5-10K
Thank you for the tip. I'll try and see what happens
×