Driver's Side door unlock repair procedure

So I had the same problem that a lot of people are expriencing, the drivers side door not unlocking with the power locks/keyless entry. Here is a writeup of the fix I did.

Start by removing the door panel. This is rather easy. There are two 8mm bolts along the bottom edge. And there is a philips screw hidden behind a small removable plastic cover right by the door handle and door lock. Pop the cover, remove the screw and then if you look closely you will see that the screw is actually holding in a piece of plastic that can separate from the rest of the door. The outline of this plastic pieve will basically circle the depressed area where the door handle and lock are. Pull this out. The door is now ready to come off. Simply slide the door panel up and once its free you can pull it out. There will be three wire harnesses. To get these off I insert small flat head screw drivers to unhook the latches that hold the harness's together. You will see a large piece of flexible plastic covering the door. This is held in place by two plastics peices at the top right and left corners and by some sort of black goo. Pop out the plastic peices with a screwdriver and peel the plastic back. Do not get the goo on clothing it won't come off. After the plastic piece is removed you should notice an auxillary piece of metal that is attached to the rest of the door with two screws. One of the screws is right by the door lock. This piece should be rusty in color. Remove the screws and remove this piece.

You can now look inside and maybe see the door latch/lock assembly. There are 6 things connected to this (all of which must be disconnected to get the assembly out. The first two are the interior door handle and lock switch connecting rods. The next two are the exterior door handle and lock switch connecting rods. Plus there are two wiring harness's. To get things going you need to remove the three Torx screws that hold the assembly in. These are on the outside of the door. Once these are removed the whole assembly is kind of free to move around inside. I first started by removing the metal rod connector for the interior door lock at the door lock switch itself. This requires kind of some weird twisting and pulling/pushing with some pliers. Do not be afraid to bend the rod a little it will bend back, but don't break the thing. Do the same for the door handle. Now that both of these rods are removed you can really move the assembly around and you should be able to pull it close enough to completley remove the interior door handle/lock rods from the assembly. You also at this point should be able to remove the wire harnesses. Four down, two to go. If you shine a flash light in you will see that there are two rods left. These we will leave connected to there respective handles, but they need to be disconnected from the assembly. If you look closely you should be able to see one of the rods is connected to a grey piece of plastic and it looks like it is screwed in. Leave this for last. Instead look at the other rod. It is attached like the previous rods were, minus the nasty bends on the end to hold it on the lock assembly. Using a flat head screw driver or some pliers you should be able to pry this one directly out. Now the only thing left is the exterior door handle rod. As I said it looks like it is screwed in and in fact it is. I actually just rotated the whole lock assembly until that rod disconnected. I then removed the assembly. Once the assembly is out you will notice that the grey piece of plastic is actually a clip which theoretically could have been unclipped to remove the last rod, however its really easy to break these things if your not careful so I recommend unscrewing it.

Now that the thing is out you can actually plug it back into the harness and start hitting the power lock button and you will see immediatly what is wrong. The actuator is simply an arm that moves up to lock and down to unlock. Unfortuantly it couples to the lock assembly by seating in a small white piece of rubber. Well over time the rubber broke thus causing your unlock problem. However when locking the actuator arm is just pushing down on the lock assembly which is why it still locks. At this point you have three options:

1. Buy one of those assemblys. It will run you about $150 at a dealership, or if you go online to a place like GM parts direct after shipping you maybe able to get it for around 100.

2. Buy this mysteriouos bumper kit that people have talked about but no one know's the part number for (including the two dealerships I called). I'm not saying this thing doesn't exist but it doesn't matter if I can't get the thing.

3. Fix it yourself. If you look closely at the little white rubber piece you may notice something about it. It is symmetric, however its function in the lock/actuator assembly is not symmeric. Carefully pry the white piece out, flip around 180 degrees and put it back in. The brocken part will now be where its not needed and you will have a fresh lip for the actuator arm to pull up on. I actually took this a step farther and put some super glue on the outside of the rubber piece. I put the glue on before I put it back in and I let it fully dry. My intent is not to glue the rubber piece in, but to reinforce the rubber wall which broke before.

Reassembly is pretty much in reverse order except for one thing. The grey clip which holds the rod for the exterior door handle, well I unclipped the clipped. I then put everything together in reverse order that I took it out, except I left clipping the door handle rod in until the very end since its pretty easy to do even with all the other parts hooked up. I even put the put the torx bolts ack into secure the latch/lock assembly. This ensures that the rod is at the right length to properly open and close the door, and I'm sure no one was counting the number of turns it took to unscrew it.

Throw the door back together and your done. Should work for another 100k, or so....

I will say that you ultimatly will be better off with the bumper kit which I assume will include a new one of these white rubber pieces but until some one can locate this thing I think my fix should hold for a while. Good luck guys

Very nice post. I will use this when I get to fixing mine.

Thank you.