Customers who purchased a 2016 Chevrolet Traverse, GMC Acadia or Buick Enclave can choose between a debit card or a 48-month/60,000-mile service protection plan on top of their existing factory warranty, the company said Friday. New labels were printed for 60,000 vehicles in dealer inventory, however approximately 135,000 were distributed before the error was corrected.
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Even when vehicles are largely unchanged year over year, occasionally the EPA will come back with different fuel-economy figures.
Consumer Reports magazine questioned why the 2016 mileage would be worse than the 2015 models when little was changed between model years. Naturally, you can drive this midsize… CR points out the 2015 GMC Acadia is listed on the EPA website as getting 19 mpg combined – the exact same number previously listed on the 2016 window sticker that GM now says is inaccurate. This would mean that GM has been doing this for years. GM has sold about 170,000 2016 SUVs in the United States, and about 130,000 are retail sales which will qualify for the compensation program.
For a front-wheel-drive version, the 2016 fuel economy of the SUVs was revised to 15 mpg city, 22 mpg highway and 18 mpg combined.
In the meantime, GM was also hit with a prospective class-action lawsuit on Tuesday. The suit, filed in a MI federal court, accuses GM of concealing the incorrect mileage ratings and failing to reveal that “the existence of the defect would diminish the intrinsic and resale value” of the vehicles. Compensating owners for not delivering the expected fuel economy could be quite expensive.
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“If they changed that vehicle for pollution reasons and the 2015s passed pollution controls, I don’t understand why they would do that and cut fuel economy by 10 percent”, Fisher said. On Thursday, an EPA spokesman declined to comment on GM’s plans to compensate owners. In all, Consumer Reports says, since the Saturn Outlook went on sale in 2007 the company has sold almost 2,000,000 of them.
