Lifter Issues on ‘21s Being Delivered to Dealers

[NYisles1]

Don't blame anyone for hostility toward GM on this issue - but also haven't seen anything that would make me believe this is a widespread failure rate due to a design issue. GM has sold 200,000+ of the SUVs so far this year, 215,000 last year, and over a million of the pickups with basically the same motors during that period. People with a bad experience are likely to seek out a forum like this -- how many posters have actually had lifter issues here? 50 ? Have we seen anyone after the published April '21 build date with lifter failure? The supplier issue and date range seems believable to me at this point ...but who knows, maybe I'm next.

 

[wsteele]

This isn't a case of bad parts - lifters out of spec from a supplier. This is a design issue. GM knows it, and will stall as long as possible. I'm willing to bet the failure rate in the 2021's is much higher than in prior years. When mine failed at 7,000 miles, and based upon the service advisors reaction (frustration at yet another one), that was all it took for me to dump a vehicle that I otherwise liked. I would not put myself or my family in the position of having a failure on the road hundreds of miles from home. Glad I got out as I hear of the cases where one cylinder bank was repaired and in 1,000 miles or less the other bank has a failure.

I now have a Ford product (Navigator) that I really like. The tahoe with 6.2 liter got horrible mileage even with cylinder deactivation on PREMIUM. I have a smoother engine that is more responsive that gets better mileage on REGULAR gas. Quite a savings every time I fill up vs. what I would have had with the Tahoe.

Nonsense.

These lifters have been used in these truck engines for over 15 years with bazillions of miles logged. The failures in the early '21 model year are well documented to be a batch of lifters with a lock spring that had out of spec heat treating, hence the early failures.

Have these lifters failed in the past, yes at times they have, but then, conventional lifters fail in use as well.

People making this out to be a software problem, or a design problem are misformed, largely due to the influence of the echo chamber of a handful of trolling internet types that gain some form of glee from that sort of thing.

 

[Quark]

If it is just a bad batch why doesn't GM identify the engines and replace them. No one left on the highway no bad pr. and GM can more easily justify the extremely high prices.

And calling people who have had the misfortune of experiencing a failed lifter on an as new vehicle trolling internet types is the heartless act of a company shill.

 

[wsteele]

If it is just a bad batch why doesn't GM identify the engines and replace them. No one left on the highway no bad pr. and GM can more easily justify the extremely high prices.

And calling people who have had the misfortune of experiencing a failed lifter on an as new vehicle trolling internet types is the heartless act of a company shill.

Ha, company shill?

No, just the facts, without the histrionics. I understand when someone has a really bad experience with a new car/truck, feeling the company was purposefully dodging responsibility. The truth is with big companies, usually incompetence is a more likely explanation.

I think the reason the company took such a bad approach along the way was it didn't know for a while what the problem was (hence, no sure way to know how many were affected, both engines and lifters).

At first they just had the dealer replace the bad lifter. Then when engines were coming back with another failure, they started replacing the bank of lifters. Somewhere along the way, some finance guy did the warranty analysis with the overlay of how many possible engines were affected and what the failure frequency might be and all the before 8000 miles versus after 8000 miles nonsense became codified.

My local dealer had a big batch of these engines with one fleet customer, so they had an accelerated learning curve on what was actually going on. Along the way they made the decision on any suspect engine, if it arrived with a bad lifter, they would replace all 16. That ended the repeat return drama.

I believe GM decided to replace all 16 lifters on any recent deliveries of 2021 trucks that had engines that were built within the suspect lifter window (there were a LOT of trucks sitting for long time waiting on some components due to back ordered chips), because they wanted this to go away once and for all.

As far as replacing all the engines that "might" have a bad lifter, I think they would only take that approach if they knew all the lifters were bad, which clearly isn't the case. The supplier of the lifters knows when the bad lifters were made (all that ISO 9000 stuff, or whatever they call it now), so GM probably knows what the actual dispersion probability of the bad lifters are and know, outside the echo chamber of the internet is manageable without wholesale engine swaps.

Would I rather have a new 2021 without DFM? Sure, I always like simplicity over complexity, but my 2007 Yukon has 8 of the same lifters these trucks have in them and is well into six figures mileage wise, half its life towing a big old enclosed trailer with my race car in back, out west on some serious grades over the Sierra's and Tehachapi's, never a problem.

I honestly don't mean to spoil your fun, sometimes the truth just doesn't fit a lurid narrative.

I wasn't referring to people who have had the misfortune of a bad lifter or valve spring internet trolls. I was calling the guys who don't even own one of these engines but show up on every one of the unfortunate's thread, rendering their outrageous opinions, usually with no mechanical understanding of what is actually even going on inside these engines when they fail. Those are the trolls of which I am referring, make sense?

 

[Quark]

Ha, company shill?

No, just the facts, without the histrionics. I understand when someone has a really bad experience with a new car/truck, feeling the company was purposefully dodging responsibility. The truth is with big companies, usually incompetence is a more likely explanation.

I think the reason the company took such a bad approach along the way was it didn't know for a while what the problem was (hence, no sure way to know how many were affected, both engines and lifters).

At first they just had the dealer replace the bad lifter. Then when engines were coming back with another failure, they started replacing the bank of lifters. Somewhere along the way, some finance guy did the warranty analysis with the overlay of how many possible engines were affected and what the failure frequency might be and all the before 8000 miles versus after 8000 miles nonsense became codified.

My local dealer had a big batch of these engines with one fleet customer, so they had an accelerated learning curve on what was actually going on. Along the way they made the decision on any suspect engine, if it arrived with a bad lifter, they would replace all 16. That ended the repeat return drama.

I believe GM decided to replace all 16 lifters on any recent deliveries of 2021 trucks that had engines that were built within the suspect lifter window (there were a LOT of trucks sitting for long time waiting on some components due to back ordered chips), because they wanted this to go away once and for all.

As far as replacing all the engines that "might" have a bad lifter, I think they would only take that approach if they knew all the lifters were bad, which clearly isn't the case. The supplier of the lifters knows when the bad lifters were made (all that ISO 9000 stuff, or whatever they call it now), so GM probably knows what the actual dispersion probability of the bad lifters are and know, outside the echo chamber of the internet is manageable without wholesale engine swaps.

Would I rather have a new 2021 without DFM? Sure, I always like simplicity over complexity, but my 2007 Yukon has 8 of the same lifters these trucks have in them and is well into six figures mileage wise, half its life towing a big old enclosed trailer with my race car in back, out west on some serious grades over the Sierra's and Tehachapi's, never a problem.

I honestly don't mean to spoil your fun, sometimes the truth just doesn't fit a lurid narrative.

I wasn't referring to people who have had the misfortune of a bad lifter or valve spring internet trolls. I was calling the guys who don't even own one of these engines but show up on every one of the unfortunate's thread, rendering their outrageous opinions, usually with no mechanical understanding of what is actually even going on inside these engines when they fail. Those are the trolls of which I am referring, make sense?

ISO 9000 tracks every lot number so it wouldn't be hard to identify those engines with the so-called bad lot of lifters and replace those lifters. GM is not being forthcoming but is dripping company excuses on the internet. That I'm sure.

 

[Doubeleive]

That GM bulletin is from a year ago, those were the instructions then. Not now. Here is the current bulletin from last week.

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2021/12/gm-releases-valve-lifter-service-update-for-v8-engines/

that's not a bulletin, it's a blog post, notating a bulletin number that as of yesterday could not be downloaded to review

 

[wsteele]

ISO 9000 tracks every lot number so it wouldn't be hard to identify those engines with the so-called bad lot of lifters and replace those lifters. GM is not being forthcoming but is dripping company excuses on the internet. That I'm sure.

I think that is what I said. I also said it takes time to track this stuff down and figure out which engines have them and which don't, or in even a more embarrassing scenario, realize all these "systems" they have to track this stuff accurately, was garbage in, garbage out.

The time delay in figuring things out, that causes so much heartache and normal poor communications with their dealer network, keeping them abreast of the latest guidance, like first replacing the one collapsed lifter, then down the road, realizing it likely wasn't going to be a single failure per engine, then maybe a false analysis that the way factories were building the engines the faulty lifters would be contained to one bank, then finding out that assumption was wrong... it all takes time and causes us who have the engines to blow a fuse.

Having worked in a big factory in my distant past (not in the auto industry, but the systems these guys use, I think, are very similar), I know how screwed up things can look to customers, all the while everyone in the company is running around with their hair on fire.

I am not defending GM's incompetence as to pertains to how they have managed this systemic problem. I have no idea why some dealers know what is going on while others seem clueless (I suspect their is plenty of blame to go around).

I do know that I constantly read stuff on the internet about these problems that are absolutely wrong and frankly not even physically possible, but that doesn't stop people who actually know nothing about the facts from posting, it is only those that I call trolls. Guys that have never even broken an engine down and looked inside, but purport to know GM has a design problem they just won't address, etc.

 

[Quark]

I think that is what I said. I also said it takes time to track this stuff down and figure out which engines have them and which don't, or in even a more embarrassing scenario, realize all these "systems" they have to track this stuff accurately, was garbage in, garbage out.

The time delay in figuring things out, that causes so much heartache and normal poor communications with their dealer network, keeping them abreast of the latest guidance, like first replacing the one collapsed lifter, then down the road, realizing it likely wasn't going to be a single failure per engine, then maybe a false analysis that the way factories were building the engines the faulty lifters would be contained to one bank, then finding out that assumption was wrong... it all takes time and causes us who have the engines to blow a fuse.

Having worked in a big factory in my distant past (not in the auto industry, but the systems these guys use, I think, are very similar), I know how screwed up things can look to customers, all the while everyone in the company is running around with their hair on fire.

I am not defending GM's incompetence as to pertains to how they have managed this systemic problem. I have no idea why some dealers know what is going on while others seem clueless (I suspect their is plenty of blame to go around).

I do know that I constantly read stuff on the internet about these problems that are absolutely wrong and frankly not even physically possible, but that doesn't stop people who actually know nothing about the facts from posting, it is only those that I call trolls. Guys that have never even broken an engine down and looked inside, but purport to know GM has a design problem they just won't address, etc.

I retired from GM I know how their tracking system keeps track of every component's lot number and which finished product it goes into. The tracking system is automated and if it's not satisfied the process won't run, period. It's a requirement of their ISO certification. If it were a bad batch of lifters as you contend they would know every engine that contains one of those lifters. All failures would be sent in to be analyzed and something as obvious as a poorly heat treated spring would be a primary suspected fault and found quickly.

 

[wsteele]

I retired from GM I know how their tracking system keeps track of every component's lot number and which finished product it goes into. The tracking system is automated and if it's not satisfied the process won't run, period. It's a requirement of their ISO certification. If it were a bad batch of lifters as you contend they would know every engine that contains one of those lifters. All failures would be sent in to be analyzed and something as obvious as a poorly heat treated spring would be a primary suspected fault and found quickly.

So you say, what did you do at GM? You seem very sure that the bad batch theory is a fabrication.

The reason I ask is a guy who works in the Tonawanda engine assembly plant posted on another forum the facts about the bad lifters, including the cutoff date of when those lifters stopped getting put into engines.

His knowledge of the failures seemed pretty detailed as well as his knowledge of how to verify if your engine might contain the problem lifters.

When I take these data points and correlate them with the dates people post of their failures and when their trucks were built, coupled with the information my local guys provides me, it all adds up.

Your assertions on the other hand, frankly seem a product of an over active imagination, but I am willing to grant you there is a margin for error in these analysis.

Did you have one of the lifers fail in a 21 MY truck?

 

[Quark]

I was an electrician who worked trouble shooting these very systems. If it is just a bad batch of lifters then GM has done a terrible job of finding and fixing the problem or they placed production and profit above all else sacrificing quality and reputation. Either scenario is extremely troubling. It would require a very long time of no reporting these problems before I would ever buy one and that is coming form someone who had anticipated the redesign for two years before they came to market.

One other thing, these lifters failure have been occurring since the introduction of AFM.