my crossbar removal tale of woe

[canadave]

So I had the bright idea that I would remove the crossbars from our 04 Vibe. Simple enough right?

Since I was bringing the Vibe in today to have that April recall work done at the local GM dealer, I decided to ask if they'd mind removing the crossbars for me as well. "Oh, geez--sure, absolutely, it's no problem at all" the lady at the counter said. Great! I would've attempted it myself, but I figure if the dealer will do it as a courtesy, that's much preferable than me possibly breaking something in my attempt. I left happy and went to work.

Couple of hours later I come back to the dealer. "All done!" she says cheerfully at the desk, and hands me the receipt for the work. No charge, of course. And did you make sure to change the mailing address on file with GM so that any further recall notices will come to me, and not to the previous owner? "Oh yes, we're submitting that today," she says. "And by the way...if you DO get mail from GM, if you wouldn't mind, just tell them how satisfied you are with your service." As she hands me my keys with a smile.

At this point, I'm like, "Heck yeah!! You guys rock. Sure I'll do that." And with that, I walked out of the service office to retrieve my car.

I get over there and the first thing I see is that the crossbars are still on the car. Sigh. I walk back over and say, "Hey, sorry, just checking...was there an issue taking the crossbars off?"

She gets super-apologetic. She forgot. She's sooo sorry. She tells me "wait right there, I'll get someone to take those off for you right now!" and she goes over to grab someone.

A minute later this kid comes out, and immediately I felt suspicious that he was your typical raised-by-Nintendo, vacant young guy. He starts unscrewing the crossbars. "No, no," I say, "that's not how they come off. You need to remove the caps." He nods, and thereupon takes his bare hands and starts trying to slide the rear caps off. "Nooo," I say, "I'm pretty sure those pry off..." He then produces a small screwdriver and starts experimentally trying to lift the cap off, clearly not knowing how this is supposed to work. He has no success.

By now I'm regretting the whole operation. I would've just told them to let me drive away and don't worry about it...but, I still figured it'd be better to let the GM dealer remove the bars if possible, rather than me trying to do it and maybe break something. So I watch this kid try to do this for a while with no luck. After a couple of minutes, I finally couldn't stand it, and asked, "Isn't there some kind of GM instructions on how precisely to do this, that you could look up?" By now, the original lady has come out to see how things are going, and she chirps, "Yes, go look up the SI" (whatever that means..sounded like some kind of instruction manual database). I go inside to wait.

After about five minutes, she comes in and says, "Hi Dave. Ummm...we're having some trouble tracking down the removal instructions...but in any case we've had a look at it, and because of the age of the car and sun exposure and so on, our tech thinks the caps are too brittle to remove--they've got a good chance of breaking."

Huh???? The caps look fine to me! And besides...you guys are dealers, so aren't you supposed to be able to do this without breaking something? And if you DO break something, wouldn't it just be a matter of getting the part in from wherever?

I guess I must've looked skeptical, because then she says "Yeah...we normally don't have requests to take those off. We do get some people who ask to put them on." I was ready to scream at that point--"WOULDN'T THE PROCEDURE TO TAKE THEM OFF BE THE REVERSE OF THE PROCEDURE TO PUT THEM ON???!!"--but I said it much more politely and nicely. She says, "Well, the one guy we had who did that left us to go to Michelin, so............" And then she kind of shrugged apologetically.

Well there you have it. Okay. I just took my keys, said "thanks anyway", and left.

Can you believe it??? Am I crazy to think that a GM dealer should have instructions how to remove the crossbars?

[vibe-a-licious]

gotta love GM

When I bought my used Vibe ('05 in '08) I asked the dealer to install a transmission cooler since I planned to tow. They said "no problem". Then a while later the "mechanic" as me to come to see the car. Apparently the hoses from the car were a different size from the cooler lines and he wasn't sure if it was a good idea to proceed.
I asked,why they said this would be no problem, and why they wouldn't you order a cooler with the right lines? It seems the only time a dealer can get you the right parts is if you provide them with the part number.

Long story short, I just to him to put the tools down and let me outta there. I've never been back to that service dept.
Incidentally I've never installed a secondary cooler either and have no issues towing.

[vibe-a-licious]

i forgot to mention...before all this, I had asked the dealer if they thought I should install a trans cooler to tow. They directed me to the owner's manual. The owner's manual tells you to contact GM for such questions. So i emailed them. Their response was to check with a GM Goodwrench service provider. Which, as I already said, got me to a useless garage where I got nothing but frustration.
not true...they had coffe and doughnuts