General Motors to Face Class Action Lawsuit Over Faulty Transmissions: Judge’s Ruling

Check out this development: a federal appeals court has just ordered General Motors to face a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company knowingly sold hundreds of thousands of vehicles with wonky transmissions.

Apparently, it’s all about the 8L45 and 8L90 eight-speed automatic gearboxes sold between 2015 and 2019, which affected around 800,000 cars and trucks, including Chevy Silverados, Colorados, Camaros, and Corvettes, GMC Sierra and Yukon models, and Cadillacs like the CTS, CT6, and Escalade. After repairs, the transmissions seem to continue “shuddering and shaking in higher gears” and “hesitating and lurching” in lower ones. The lawsuit was originally filed back in 2018 and accuses GM of instructing dealerships to tell customers that rough shifts were “normal”.

GM’s defense is that most class members never experienced issues, and there were too many differences among class members to justify group lawsuits. But the judge 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, making bad products isn’t a big deal, but lying about it is.

The outcome for owners of these cars is still uncertain, 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.