GM Won't Give The Sonic A (Complete Set Of) Brake (Pads)

Quick: What does the Chevy Sonic have in common with the original Bugatti tourers? Simple: they were built to go, not to stop. Well, the Sonic isn’t necessarily built to “go” as such, but you get the idea.

In its continuing effort to make life easier for burned-out TTAC headline writers, General Motors announced their latest “Mark Of Excellence” today: a recall campaign covering 4,873 Sonics sold in the United States and Canada. What’s wrong with these Sonics? As John Mayer would say, something’s missing…

Today’s online edition of the Chicago Tribune rather straight-facedly noted that

General Motors Co. is recalling 4,873 of its current year Chevrolet Sonic subcompact cars in the United States and Canada for possible missing front brake pads, the company and federal safety regulators said on Friday…

GM said that its research shows that 20 to 30 of the recalled cars were sold without one of its brake pads. Of the total recalled, 4,296 were sold to U.S. customers and 577 to Canadian customers, GM said.

For once, it turns out that the Sonic has a problem which cannot be attributed to the group of Korean engineers and stylists at Daewoo the global, multi-national, multi-ethnic, absolutely-including-Europe-and-United-States-resources, did-we-mention-it-was-global team which designed the car. As a bit of a connoisseur of production-line data myself, I’d love to see how they figured out that “20 to 30” Sonics were missing pads. Honestly, when I hear the phrase “pad checking” in regards to mass production, I think of companies like Nike which wouldn’t let women leave their sweatshop lines to change a tampon, not the idea that nobody’s looking to see if a full set of brake pads is going in the car.

Oh well. If you’re currently the owner of a Sonic, here’s what you can do to address the issue:

• Get the lug wrench and jack out from the miserable little compartment in the back of the car.
• Loosen the lugs on both front wheels.
• Raise the left side of the vehicle at the suggested jacking point. Remove the wheel. Using a flashlight, check to ensure that there is a brake pad on both sides of your front discs. You may have noticed certain symptoms, such as: longer stopping distances, horrible squealing, fatal impalement on roadside objects on the outside of sharp corners. Be aware of these symptoms as you check.
• Replace the wheel and finger-tighten the lugs.
• Repeat the process on the right side.
• Tighten the lugs to what feels “about right”.
• Drive the car to the nearest competing dealer and trade it in on a make of car which is known to ship with a complete set of brake pads pretty much all the time, such as Peugeot, Yugo, or Crosley.

I’m just kidding, guys. Every single owner of a Sonic in the United States can probably do the following:

• Complain to GM the next time your rental agency is buying 10,000 of them.

That’s all, folks! And if you see a Sonic behind you… I’m terribly sorry!