The New American Revolution?

GM Tells Dealers to Stop Selling Aveo

By JOHN PORRETTO, AP Auto Writer
DETROIT - General Motors Corp. has notified Chevrolet dealers to stop selling the recently launched Aveo, the automaker's new Korean-made entry-level car, a spokesman said Thursday.

GM spokesman Jim Schell, who handles recall and product-safety communications, confirmed the company had issued a "stop delivery" notice to dealers, but he couldn't elaborate on the notification.

"Obviously, the dealers are honoring that," Schell told The Associated Press. "Any more information would be partial." […]

Bad run of luck here for GM, and this isn't going to help keep Chevy's Revolutionary fires lit. The Aveo is intended to fill the bottom-feeder niche, but at least on the surface it seems to have a lot going for it.

No word yet on what's wrong--however, a stop delivery order is not something done for minor repairs or recalls, but rather for safety issue that could cause injury or loss of life if not corrected immediately. Be interesting to see what the hubbub's about--a hint from the spokesman about the nature of the problem sure would have been nice.

UPDATE 2/20/04: Well now, according to this, the stop-delivery notice was not issued yesterday, but last Friday, and it expires today. I think. It's rather confusing.

The article notes that the reason the order was issue in the first place was because of the concern that a five Aveos had been involved in accidents recently, which a is pretty high percentage considering it just went on the market, and only 8200 have been sold since November. After investigating to determine if something was wrong with the car, it was determined that it was just an unhappy coincidence and nothing inherently wrong with the Aveo, which I'm sure is a big relief to Chevrolet.
posted by Terry at 12:04:00 PM