GMC Envoy broken rear gate glass shattered

[kobuzz]

Hello All,
This is my first posting here. My wife drives an 03 Envoy XL and upon my opening the lift gate today the rear glass shattered and sprayed everyone nearby with glass. It happened with seemingly explosive force. I could hardly believe my eyes, fortunately, nobody received anything other than minor cuts. I found many other postings here like this which I was going to add to but the threads were locked. I'd like to reopen this and start some type of organized group type of complaint to GM. Our Envoy is just out of warranty unfortunately but this is obviously a defect with such weak glass. They were making glass better than this 15 years ago. Why should we decline in quality? There's no good reason for it. I've got to vent here a little if you'll allow me. I've driven GM all my adult life, I've always had Pontiac cars and Chevy Trucks. I managed to convince my wife that when buying GM you couldn't go wrong. Even though she wanted an import, we bought a used 99 blazer five years ago and it simply fell apart at the seams, to the point where we just cut our losses and figured we just had bad luck on this particular one. We figured it was a friday build. -( Last year we decided on an 03 Envoy because it had 40k miles and seemed a perfect family vehicle for us, and it was GMC vs.Chevy so it had to be better. Boy were we wrong. This thing has more problems. I could write an entire book on it but i'll just outline my three major issues. It has rear A/C as it's the xl version and the lines that go there developed a leak somehow and this makes the entire a/c system useless because it can't hold a charge. It's a very difficult fix as the a/c lines run above the frame and are inaccessable without removing the body from the frame or so the dealer says. I was under it. I concur. I wonder if many other people expreience this with the rear a/c. Please contact me if you have had this issue. I'd be interested to know. Now then, this broken glass thing. How wrong is this? We also had to replace a wheel bearing, another common problem I've heard. The electric mirrors don't work, the rear electric windows quit working with no apparant solution to be found... This is just a partial list. cmon, 40K miles!!! Seriously GM??? I can't even begin to express how disappointed and even downright disgusted that I am with GM these days. I'll propably never buy GM again, at least not anything SUV related and if i'm in the market for a car or truck you can bet i'll be heavily considering something else other than GM. I own an American business where i'm unfortunately forced to use some overseas suppliers but I can tell you that as soon as I see poor quality from my vendors, that garbage is removed at once and usually not ever recommended in the future. I've found myself dumping suppliers who sacrifice quality for the sake of a dollar. What I see happening more and more is the misuse of once great brand names like GMC are being sacrificed to make a dollar now. Make the shareholders happy now. Cut costs, increase profits. Who cares about next year. We'll worry about next year then. It's senseless, it's careless, and it's wrong. Sorry for the long winded rant here. My point is, that our time and energy is way too precious to waste with awful quality products and that if we find ourselves joining the crowd already buying imports due to superiour quality, then my only hope is that GM will stand up and take notice and take action. Hopefully they may quit worrying about their stock price and start taking care of the business of quality control.
I can be reached through email if anyone is interested in replying personally: ( korey at shoe-store.net )

Kobuzz