Chevy Truck

I have a 2004 Chevy Trailblazer and we bought it in October 2005. At the end of December 2005 we drove to Steamboat, it was a 4 or 5 hour car ride from here. Just as we were getting to Steamboat the oil gage kept climbing and everything in the car manual mentioned the oil gage getting lower not climbing so I was not too worried. After that the oil gage slowly started to not work. I took it into the shop but they did not know what was wrong with it because they could get it to go wrong - at this time you had to drive a while to see that it was not working. Eventually it gave out all together. I took it into the shop a few months ago and had them take a look at it and the dealer said that I needed a new cluster (something electronic to do with the gages in the car). The fix was about $400 and I said don't fix it because I don't have $400 to make my oil gage work.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving we got in the car to head up to my brothers and we were not even 20 miles from home and we noticed that the speedometer was not working at all. It said we were going 30 and we were actually doing around 60. Right now the speedometer doesn't even move. Oh and the RPM gage only works sometimes. The car went back to the shop so they could order the cluster. I asked the guy if they see this problem a lot. (In Gunnison it seems as if half the cars are the Chevy Trailblazer) The shop said that they see this problem all of the time.

This is really upsetting at the quality of workmanship in the US and the quality of workmanship that Chevy and GM is producing. When I buy a fairly new car I would except something like this to work for a long time. This was one of the main reasons for buying an '04 - I would not have to deal with maintenance issues like this for a long time. This cluster started going when the car was less than 1 1/2 years old. If I had bought this car brand new this type of thing (I would hope) would have been covered under the warranty. What kind of vehicles is Chevy creating? I don't think I will ever buy a Chevy again. I think I will stick with foreign cars.

At this point I wish I would have kept my 1997 Nissan Sentra. It was a great little car, no frills, no maintenance, great gas mileage. The one thing it did not have was room for me, Mikayla and 2 big dogs.

I think the next car we will buy will be something smaller, more gas efficient and another Nissan or a Toyota. Joe loves his Toyota 4-Runner that has about 150,000 miles on it and it is still running great with no special maintenance. What are your experiences with buying new cars?