A federal appeals court has ordered General Motors to face a class action lawsuit that claims the company knowingly sold hundreds of thousands of vehicles with bad transmissions.
Per Reuters, the issue concerns the 8L45 and 8L90 eight-speed automatic gearboxes sold from model years 2015 to 2019, involving approximately 800,000 cars and trucks including Chevy Silverados, Colorados, Camaros, and Corvettes, various GMC products like the Sierra and Yukon, as well as Cadillacs such as the CTS, CT6, and Escalade. Even after repairs, the transmissions apparently “shudder and shake in higher gears” and “hesitate and lurch” in lower ones. Originally filed back in 2018, the lawsuit also accuses the automaker of instructing dealerships to assure customers that harsh shifts were “normal.”
GM’s counterargument is that most class members “never experienced problems” and that there were “too many differences among class members to justify group lawsuits.”
The judge, however, isn’t buying it. According to Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore, “Exactly how, and to what extent, each of the individual plaintiffs experienced a shudder or shift quality is irrelevant” to the issue of GM concealing known defects. In other words, it’s not really a crime to make bad products (as long as you’re not hurting anyone). Lying about it, however, is a whole different ball game.
What exactly the outcome will be for owners of these cars remains to be seen, but the case is Speerly et al v. General Motors LLC, 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 23-1940. The law firm representing consumers is Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll.
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Source Agencies
