I love my current Chevrolet Traverse.
My thoughts toward General Motors designers who seem to hate petrolheads who are at least reasonably handy with a spanner usually tends to start at Dante’s Ninth Ring of Inferno.
Mending her has tended to be a exercise ranging from kind of painful to straight up God-awful.
- Painful without a very long shaft T25 Torx screwdriver – Replacing the engine air filter
- Disassembling the floor at the 2R seat position (big bonus…doing this in the dark!) – Replacing the battery
- Thank goodness Nick has smaller hands and professional skill – Replacing the temperature sensor
And then there’s the all-time champion mending the Traverse horror show when it comes time to swap out the headlamps. I’ll be sure to document that bit of nastiness the next time I have to do it (which knowing my luck won’t be long because modern bulbs don’t last for, well…a certain substance that comes out the south-bound end of a north-bound bovine).
For those of you who remember when swapping those bulbs was a matter of popping the bonnet, twisting out the old bulb and quickly replacing it…you’re in for a treat when you learn what it takes to replace a headlamp bulb on a 2014 Traverse.
So you might imagine that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to mending the blown bulb that illuminates the number plate.
After all, pretty much every other maintenance activity other than adding more oil or washer fluid seems purposefully designed to first frustrate then royally piss off Traverse drivers.
Not having a Chilton’s manual laying about, we consult the sages of YouTube and discover that only one tool is required…a screwdriver.
All you have to do is use that screwdriver to slide the lamp cover to the right a bit and it pops right out.
That seemed more than a little anti-climactic, to put it mildly.
But I wasn’t going to be disappointed in the task being a bit more painful than it really had to be because the wires that connect the bulb holder to the electrical harness are really short and made getting a grip to twist the bulb out of the housing a bit of a bother.
Not quite the bother that is disassembling the plastic panel in the wheel well to replace the front headlamps completely blind and by feel but still I think GM could have at least given another centimetre or two of wire and it wouldn’t have broken their profit margins but would have made this job about as fast as changing a bulb was in the old days before everything got so bloody complicated!
Ten minutes later, new bulbs and the Traverse now has better illumination of the number plate to discourage official notice being taken of my driving… 🙂
