If you don’t want to form an irrational emotional attachment to a car, don’t name it. That may be the lasting lesson of this car. I wasn’t even the one who named it–that’s the fault of the actual owner of the car, my girlfriend at the time, now my wife. So perhaps it shouldn’t even be included in this series, but I drove it pretty regularly for 3 years and then exclusively for a few months, and maintained it that entire time. In fact I almost certainly have more time invested under the hood of this car than anything I’ve actually owned. So – here it is.
By the time I met my future wife in 2007, she had already owned this 2000 Alero for quite a few years. Her previous car had been totaled in an accident in the spring of 2003, right around the time of her graduation from college. So her parents gave her this Alero, with which to start her professional life. The Alero has been covered in decent depth here, but to briefly re-introduce the car, it was Oldsmobile’s compact/mid-size offering from ’99 to the end of the road for the brand in 2004. The styling was quite attractive, looking like a slightly scaled-down version of the W-body Intrigue, and it offered the choice of 4 or 6 cylinder power. This one was the middle GL trim level, including such niceties as alloy wheels and power windows, with the 2.4 liter LD9 “Twin Cam” 4-cylinder and a 4-speed automatic.
GM clearcoat cancer in full evidence.
This particular Alero hadn’t had the easiest life though up to that point–it had over 140,000 miles, and had already fallen victim to the poor-quality GM paint work of the era, with the clear coat delaminating badly on the hood, driver’s side fender top, and A-pillar. The gray interior showed quite a bit of wear also, and the materials were mostly unimpressive. Not the best initial impression… In the first year I knew her, the Alero suffered a split radiator hose (the first of many things I would fix), a cracked thermostat housing, a failed power window, Plus a water pump just before we met. This combined with the many other little issues–the dash pad had partially delaminated and rolled up, neither the CD player nor the cassette player worked properly, the turn signals had a peculiar quirk where they would start and stop clicking for no apparent reason, it had a slow coolant leak, and to top it all off, the key was very difficult to turn in the ignition. I would have expected a lot better of a 7 year old car, so my already iffy opinion of GM around the turn of the millenium was lowered further.
However, it should be noted that I hadn’t actually driven the car until sometime in late 2008 or perhaps even early 2009. And the first time I drove it, I started to see that the attractive styling wasn’t the only thing that sold these cars. For a humble I4, it actually felt peppy. No, you weren’t going to win any drag races, but it had quite acceptable pickup. The handling wasn’t bad, either. This was a car with 150k hard miles on it, no less, so I could imagine that when new it was a pleasant little car to drive. “Fun” might be an overstatement but it wasn’t bad at all, contrary to my expectations. Sometime in this vicinity was when the car, heretofore unnamed, acquired its nickname from my girlfriend–The Crabmobile. A silly name, but amusing, and added a little personality to this otherwise flawed automobile.
My discovery of its driving virtues was handy as, in late 2009, I found myself driving the Alero to work daily. My girlfriend had taken a job as a social worker, which often took her into undesirable parts of town. With the somewhat precarious reliability of the Alero, I suggested that we trade cars for work, since my Marauder was newer and considerably more reliable. Thankfully she was agreeable to this, so the Alero was my primary vehicle from late ’09 through mid ’10. And, for all its faults, it worked just fine as a commuter vehicle. The A/C blew ice cold, the seats were comfortable, and it got pretty good gas mileage. It wasn’t exciting, but I still had the Marauder for after-work use and travel, so the Alero served well enough in the interim. In the middle of 2010 her agency reorganized and laid off all of the case managers, at which point she decided to go back to school. I got the Marauder back for my usual work commute, though we would switch cars freely depending on who needed the more reliable car for several years afterward.
This wasn’t to say it was trouble-free. Issues came and went with some regularity–another window failed, slowly sinking whenever the car was in motion. I found that it wasn’t due to a regulator in the usual sense, but instead the way GM had decided to attach the glass pane to the regulator. The window was attached the regulator assembly by two plastic clips which connected to the cable. As the car aged, these clips became brittle and cracked, allowing the window to sag and eventually move on its own. Fell all the way down into the door one day unannounced; lucky the glass didn’t break. So the door panel and window had to come out, and replace the clips with new ones. Not only was this annoying, but they had the temerity to charge almost $40 for two small plastic clips that weren’t even half the size of a credit card. Not cool, GM.
At some point it started running quite poorly and stalling. After lots of troubleshooting with an ex-mechanic friend, and replacing plugs, wires, coils, fuel filter, and fuel pump, it turned out to be a vacuum leak. This was follwed by a more serious issue; the Alero developed an unnerving habit of completely cutting off while in motion. My girlfriend would be driving down the road and, with no warning, the engine would cut off, taking with it the power assist on the brakes and steering. Thankfully it didn’t cause an accident, but after the third time, she refused to drive it and it became mine again until I figured out what was going on.
If this sounds familiar, it should–the Alero had one of the infamous ignition switches that got GM into so much hot water a couple years later. This was well before the recall, but searching the web and the forums (yes, there is in fact an Alero forum online) revealed the issue. So I undertook to repair it myself, and replace the ignition cylinder while I was in there, as the troublesome key had become a major annoyance by that time. The ignition was in the dash, rather than on the column, and consequently that turned into a Major Job. What a complete pain in the ass. I think I had to take *everything* on the driver’s side and in the console apart to get to the damn switch, in the middle of winter, in an unheated garage. About a year after the car was gone, we got a recall notice from GM, good for a laugh.
It was in this very same time period that another memorable issue struck the Alero, and that one wasn’t even the car’s fault. It started when, on a Sunday, I had again enlisted the services of the same ex-mechanic friend who had helped me previously with the coils and fuel pump. Truth be told I no longer even remember what the problem was. While leaving his work area (a friend’s garage), another car was blocking the driveway, so I drove onto the grass to go around, and hit a deep rut or hole of some kind. The suspension bottomed out and something scraped, but everything seemed OK so I drove on. About a mile down the road was the on-ramp to Interstate 40, which would take me home. Just before getting onto the highway it occurred to me that I should stop for gas, so I pulled into a gas station.
That decision to stop for gas saved the car. As I pulled into the brightly lit gas station from the road, I noticed that I was trailing smoke. I stopped at the gas pump amidst copious smoke from under the car; one quick look underneath revealed that I was leaking something, and lots of it. The leak turned out to be transmission fluid. As the fluid escaped during my drive down the road, it blew all over the exhaust manifold and pipe, causing the smoke. I’m sure that, had I gotten onto the highway, I would have lost the rest of the fluid in short order (it all leaked out in a few minutes) and blown up the transmisson before I even knew what was going on.
We discovered that at the spot where the car bottomed out was a mostly buried landscaping timber, with just the corner poking up through the grass. That must have hit just right and holed the transmission pan. My friend, being a stand-up kind of guy, told me to have it towed back to his garage, where he beat out and welded the hole in the pan, replaced the trans filter, and refilled the transmission. Despite it being kind of late, he took care of it so I could get to work the next morning. When leaving after the work was done, I was sure to stay on the driveway! The trans didn’t give me any trouble afterward; no permanent damage thanks to a BIG stroke of luck.
A coupe version parked in the same lot as I did at work. There was also a gold-colored sedan.
As I noted in my Marauder COAL last week, in the fall/winter of 2011, I came up with the plan to replace the Marauder with a car that would be my girlfriend’s long-term, and I would take over the Alero in the interim. So the Marauder was traded in November ’11. I drove the new one from time to time in between November and May, but starting in June, it was just me and the Crabmobile. I had proposed to my girlfriend on New Year’s Day, and she accepted. But she had decided to pursue her master’s degree, and her final decision on which program to enroll in led her to Richmond, Virginia, about 160 miles away from our home at the time in Durham, NC. I was more than ready for a change of scenery and tired of my current job; however, by the time she was ready to start her new program in late May, I still hadn’t found employment there. So I stayed behind in Durham and moved into a month-to-month room rental while my fiancee moved up to Richmond and started classes.
The coolant and oil leaks had worsened again by this point, and while the Alero was still getting it done for the day-to-day work commute (as long as I kept an eye on the fluids) it kept me from visiting my fiancee in Richmond as I didn’t trust it on a long trip. No matter; I was working two jobs at the time as we had two rent checks each month, so I didn’t have much free time anyway. But it was driven daily, and never once let me down. It got to the point where I had to top up the coolant pretty much every time I drove it to keep the temperature gauge out of the red, but it got me where I needed to go. Finally, in mid-September, I got a call from a recruiter that resulted in a phone interview the next day, and I had a job in Richmond and could rejoin my fiancee.
So on the last day of September 2012, I packed all my belongings into the Alero, and after topping up the fluids, embarked northward with some trepidation. The car hadn’t been on a long trip in ages, and I wasn’t quite sure if it would make it. To my relief, it was flawless, and I arrived in Richmond on time and with no drama. That drive was, essentially, the Crabmobile’s last and greatest feat. We kept it for a while afterward, but it was rarely driven, as my fiancee took the bus to school and I took the other car to work. In December we acquired another car (future COAL) and the Alero was no longer necessary. I considered selling it, but it seemed an awful lot of effor for a little return (with all the outstanding issues I doubt I could have gotten $500). So in the end we decided to donate it to a charity, which would then sell the car at auction.
Farewell and good luck.
With all the problems the Alero had in our ownership, you’d think I would have been glad to be rid of it. My fiancee was; she’d put up with the car’s shenanigans for far longer than I had, and had a not insignificant amount of money into it in repairs. But despite all the trouble, I had gotten to kind of like the thing by the end, and I think the name had a lot to do with it. The Alero was just a car, and not a great one at that. The Crabmobile name gave it a personality, in spite of all its flaws and all the time (and skinned knuckles and mumbled expletives) invested. So when the driver from the charity showed up on a rainy February day to pick up the Alero, and drove it up onto a trailer and out of our lives, I felt some legitimate sadness. There was a lot of inconvenience along the way, so much so that my wife swears she’ll never drive another GM product. But in the end, through almost 10 years with my wife and 5+ with me, that car became part of our lives. And so I bade farewell to the Crabmobile, a character beyond its flaws and one that made good in the end.
I actually sort of liked these as I thought they were the best looking domestic car in that size class. And….they were available with 2 and 4 doors. I always felt the similar Grand Am was too overstyled.
The downside? They had a reputation for lackluster build quality. No matter what it looked like or what it cost, a GM almost always had inferior build to any competitors.
What kind of name for a car is “Alero?” GM must have had a death wish to choose it. Could have turned it around backwards and it would have been just as good a name. “Orela.”
Yeh…but still better than the German-aping alphanumerics.
“Alero the cure for male ED. Available by prescription only”.
GM believed anything was better than the Achieva name.
The great dilemma of every GM car for the past 30 years. The engineers design something pretty darn decent, but the profit margins are too slim on the car as spec’d. So the second level guys go through every component and shave a penny’s cost off each design. This is done by reducing the expected cycle life of the parts. (I mean, no one is going to roll the driver’s window down 2,500 time during the warranty period, so make the design life 2,501 uses before breaking and go on). Next, the suppliers are ‘Lopezed’ -squeezed on their prices – causing them to shave more pennies off their materials and production costs. Management then saves more money by cutting testing rigour and okays the car for production ‘ASAP minus sixty days’. Production management now squeezes more
speed‘efficiency’ out of the line by cutting staffing, speeding the line, and reducing QC “since the individual components have already been QC’d before delivery to the line”, right? Right? Oh, uhm, RIGHT!And so it goes….
Note: GM is not the only guilty party on replacement part prices. The power passenger seat in my wife’s BMW 328i broke a plastic gear about the diameter of your little finger.
$55 for the- gear– not counting the labor to remove the seat and install the new gear. This is way I will never own another BMW that isn’t under warranty
Thus a pretty decent original design
My brother’s 1993 Toyota Corolla had power window option. Some years later, the driver’s side dropped down and failed to function again. The cause? Two weak plastic prongs holding the metal cable broke off.
The cost? $254 for the ENTIRE assembly (winder, motor, rail, etc.).
When you train together all the “money-saving measures” like that it’s bothersome and seems it should be sue-worthy if not criminal.
Love the photos of the Crabmobile. They look pretty good on my phone in spite of the clearcoat rash! 🙂
I’m a sucker for big expressive taillights, so I always thought the Aleros were cool looking. A coupe would’ve been my first choice, but the 4 door ones looked good too. Make mine in dark metallic blue, please.
Looks-wise, the Alero big brothers Intrigue and Aurora were too generic, jelly-blob like for my taste and thus rated zero interest.
Judging by how close to extinction the Aleros are in these parts and some of the anecdotes, I may have dodged a bullet.
As it was, I ended up with a well-used 2000 Malibu, which was a close cousin. (?)
The Malibu of the era is definitely a close cousin. It’s an N-body just the same as the Alero, but its first generation was a half-step off. The Malibu replaced the L-body Corsica in 1997, whereas the N-body Achieva/Skylark/Grand Am had been on their current generation since 1992. For ’99, the Skylark was dropped, the Achieva was replaced with the Alero, and the Grand Am was updated; the Malibu which had already been in production for a couple of years continued on through to ’03.
Not only did the car serve you and your girl for 5 and 10 years, the Alero also gave you the chance to show off your mechanical knowledge further impressing your wife to be.
I always liked the body style of this car, and the drivetrain on your example seems to have been quite durable.
Looks like VW and GM both took lessons from each other on how to build plastic fantastic crappy power window regulators in this time period.
The Old’s still looked good as it was being towed away, I can appreciate it was a little hard to see it disappear into the sunset. Great story, as usual.
My mother in law had this same exact car. These always felt like a cheap honda accord knockoff to me. Yes it was a surprisingly fun to drive and had a modern design but every part the car was composed of was bottom of the barrel cheap and poorly assembled, which is sad. You could see it was a good design and poor execution. If gm did both parts well they wouldn’t have gone bankrupt.
3800fan: “Cheap Honda Accord knockoff”: GM hit the target precisely, then.
Given that their effort and treasure was being siphoned off for trucks and SUVs at the time, this really was GM at peak arrogance.
I completely get it, Chris. This car will hold memories forever because it entered your life in a rather exciting phase.
This model lured a lot of people into ownership. It looks pretty. GM cars drive really well. I have driven some. The quality of materials sucks and the prices of spare parts are a crying shame. These are the kind of cars you hate to love.
By the way, the pictures of your Alero are top notch. With those gracing the ad you could have gotten more than $500 in a sale. It would have been just one more time somebody got more for it than it was worth.
Owning an 86 N Body Calais at the time these came out, I was interested in the Alero. But I found it too big.
The Achieva had been the right size and I liked the styling, as I did the Alero, but was disappointed GM had abandoned the market the Calais [and other Ns] had targeted: a premium small car, well trimmed and with value commensurate with it’s higher price.
It made the Intrigue seem redundant and given that I thought the Alero was a better looking car compared to it’s anonymous looking sister, made me wonder why Oldsmobile bothered with the Intrigue. It seemed there was no valid reason to choose a slightly larger Olds for a higher price. Going up the scale, the Intrigue was a cipher.
I wouldn’t have given up either, Chris M. I had a similar experience with the aforementioned Calais. It wouldn’t give up or leave me stranded but it took a lot of effort to keep it on the road, even with under 50,000 miles when I gave it to my parents in 99.
Now my little brother is driving it and fixing it up. It’s been in the family for 25 years now.
Funny how nothing much changed between 86 and 2000 with GM.
I’m in southern Ontario and while the Alero was once a pretty common car here, I’ve never seen one sun damaged. In fact I’d assumed that by the end of the 90’s that GM figured out how to create both durable interiors and clearcoat.
I’ve never seen another with clearcoat quite so bad as this one–it may have been the bright red paint in particular, which seems quite susceptible to fading and damage. But my observations seem to indicate that, while GM (and others) made progress with clearcoat durability since the mid 90’s, they hadn’t completely figured it out until a few years after the millenium.
The interior materials were just plain cheap. If they had used better-quality stuff it would have held up, but they chose not to.
I drove an Alero for a weekend back in 2003 and liked it – I was particularly impressed with the gas mileage. I still don’t completely trust GM, however, and if I was plunking down cash for a car now, it would likely be Japanese.
Whose dumb idea was it to put the clutch slave cylinder inside the bell housing on these cars? What used to be a half hour job now meant dropping the tranny, which meant dropping the front sub-frame.
I’ll bet a lot of Aleros got scrapped when the clutch pedal stopped working.
How many Aleros had manuals, though? I’ve never seen any second or third-gen N-body with a stick (not that I’ve looked very hard).
I’ve never seen one in person but the forums I mentioned showed a decent number of coupes with the 4cyl/5-speed manual combo. I don’t know if you could get the manual with the V6 or not.
The same genius that put the clutch slave cylinder in the bell housing of the 87-93 YJ Wrangler, various years of Ford Rangers and a many other cars and trucks over the years.
On the Alero, I don’t think it was a big issue as the manual transmission take rate was very low.
In the fall of 2007, the ’97 Sunfire I’d been driving for the previous nine years was still running fine with 163K miles, but finally enough things had worn out to make me want to look for a replacement. But I had no money and needed something cheap. Craigslist revealed a maroon (not bright red like Chris’ car) ’01 Alero 4-door. GL2 trim, 3400 V6, 100K miles, for $3300. Pretty small money for something that recent, because it had a little mild hail damage that didn’t bother me any. Interior was nice, but oddly even smaller than the Sunfire. In any case, I ended up buying the car and driving it for over three years.
It was never perfect, and after two years’ ownership it needed a tuneup and a replacement fuel injector; more money I didn’t really have at the time. Other than that, it never needed anything but general maintenance. I put 50K on it by early 2011, but then everything started going to hell. The (surprisingly expensive) tires were worn out, the lower intake manifold gasket which had been fixed years before was leaking again, it needed a wheel bearing, the windshield was cracked, and the driver’s power window switch wasn’t as reliable as one might like. Besides that, I was having back problems, and was having a rather difficult time getting in and out of that rather low car. Adding all this up, it was time for it to go. The Ford dealer gave me $800 in trade on a four-year-old Five Hundred, and that was that.
So it goes. My memory of it wasn’t much different from Chris’. Nice enough car that got me through a tough time, but too many problems to make a long term keeper out of it.
My sister has had a few of these. Not a bad car, but lots of gremlins. Her current one is a gold 4 door. But then she bought my ’97 Aurora from me, and the Alero’s been parked since.
I like the 2 door model, but liked the Achieva coupe better. Had one until the heater core blew. Too bad the build quality is so poor.
I thought the Alero was a good looking car when it hit the market. Way nicer styling than the Grand Am, which was very overdone. Was there a Buick version? For some reason, I can’t recall one.
When the Alero first came out, I was lucky enough to get one as a rental car. I was on a business trip and picked up the car at the Dallas airport. It was a 2 door, same red color as the feature car, but I believe it was the level above the GL, which I though was odd for a rental.
Anyway, the car had less than 200 miles on It when I signed the rental papers. Happy as a pig in you know what, I drove off the airport property and when directly to my hotel, which was with in a 20 minute ride from the airport. I found the Alero to be very comfortable, had pretty good power (I wasn’t sure what was under the hood), great A/C, and decent sound system. Arriving at the hotel, I parked in one of the spots assigned for check in, locked the car, and proceeded to the front desk to register. About 10 minutes later, I got back into the Alero, put the key in the ignition, started her up, and tried to shift out of park. Nothing happened! The lever would NOT move out of park. I must of tried a dozen times and nothing!
I called the rental company, and within minutes, they dispatched someone to meet me at the hotel with another rental car. The young man from the rental company tried to get the Alero out of park, also without success.
I was actually upset because I was looking forward to driving the Alero for a few days. I ended up with a Taurus, which was standard rental car fare back then. Dull and boring…
Buick didn’t get an N-body after the discontinuation of the Skylark in ’98. Not sure why. Sounds like your rental was the top GLS trim, which is indeed odd for a rental. The base level was GX, then GL1 and GL2 (ours was a GL1 I think, hard to decipher as there was no trim level badging), and GLS at the top of the range.
Hi Chris, I wonder what a Skylark version would of looked like? Maybe a bit strange and angular like the last version? I had one of those as a rental once too. The grill looked like a beak, the slopping body line over the rear wheel well was just plain bizarre, and the inside was extremely over done with the strangest looking dashboard I’ve ever seen. It did run well, and the seats were extremely comfortable I will admit!
Great retrospective. I owned a 2004 Grand Am, which by that time even looked basically like an Alero with gaudy Pontiac fascias and interior. At least they’d finally removed the side cladding by then.
I only had mine for two years and 24K, but I’ll echo Chris’s impressions of the experience. My SE1 GA was great fun (yes, fun!) to drive, thanks to its eager 2.2L Ecotec four-banger and 5-speed manual. Handling wasn’t anything to write home about, but it wasn’t embarrassing, either. Decent (Monsoon) stereo.
Alas, the ever-present poor GM quality made itself known with the first year of ownership. The rubberized paint/coating over the HVAC dials and radio buttons flaked off at random (revealing the white plastic underneath, illuminated bright red at night) and the vinyl dash and door coverings had started to bubble. The windshield wipers stopped working at 8,000 miles – right in the middle of a deluge, of course – and the front suspension had a disquieting ‘clonk’ over bumps within 10K.
It was my last GM product.
Must have been the CC Effect at work. This morning on my way into the office a silver Alero crossed my path in a strip mall parking lot and I distinctly recall thinking it was a nice looking car. As a matter of fact I turned to watch it as it proceeded along its route. Like many cars, this is one that is done a great disservice if it’s not fitted with the alloy wheel option. The alloys they came from the factory with just really complemented the styling well IMO.
Most of these same issues happened to my friend’s 2002 Taurus wagon along with a few others. Clearcoat peeling, engine leaks with the intake manifold gasket going south along with a bad oil pan gasket and both head gaskets seeped oil. All 4 door panels had the vinyl trim fall off and the glove box door broke. It also developed a stalling problem with 130K miles that turned out to be a bad computer. The front end also clunked incessantly but new sway bar bushings and struts assemblies only fixed one of the many noises. And surprise both front power windows needed not only new bushings but new window regulators too.
It’s not just GM’s with these issues. Even my uncle who owns a foreign repair shop specializing in VW’s/Audi’s is always replacing broken door handle assemblies and plastic window components, failed coil packs and oil leaking turbo engines that have a severe drinking problem.
I live in a town of 12k and cannot believe how many of these I see driven around here. I can make a trip across town and see 4 or 5 of them on about any day. Most are in pretty nice shape, too. The coupes do seem to be a little more prone to rust behind the doors.
Of course, some of it may be due to the fact that we had an Olds dealer here until GM pulled the rug out from under it.
I have never driven one, but I have always liked the looks.
A former boss had a similar year Grand Am 4 dr V6 auto. I rode with him several times for long business trips. I got to fill the tank on leaving and arriving. I was always amazed because he drove with a heavy foot at 130 kph and we averaged 6.5 l/100 km (35+ USMPG) on the highway. The only problem he had with it was the fuel pump. He did believe in regular maintenance though. He put the car in twice a year to his independent mechanic and told him to just take care of any problems. Several people in that office also had GA’s and ran them to ridiculous miles.