From what i’ve Read Holden spent engineers time investigating this issue which was first seen with USA police vehicles which were operating 20 hours per day. It was all to do with cyclic movement of the assembly causing fretting corrosion of some connector pins. I can’t say i’m familiar with the electric power steering assembly myself and I’ve only looked at diagrams and read on about this issue on the www.
It seems solutions were developed by Holden starting with cheapest; apply dielectric grease to pins, to applying epoxy on the connector to vehicles in field (to reduce flex and vibration to parts), to modification of the components resulting in new part numbers fitted to new vehicles and retrofitted to delivered vehicles as part of the USA recall. How it unfolded down under is anyone’s guess but I think taxi drivers were the first to have the problem and I can not find an Australian recall notice on the accc web site for this issue (so suspect it is a TSB).
But i’d expect manufacturers would not blindly replace parts to avoid diagnosis.
Sadly the complete story seems to be defined in bits a pieces in various publications around the www and not in one consolidated place. So i’ll again bang on about us Aussie’s needing better access to TSB’s and recall notices as dealer service is **** and we are sometimes left exposed with our vehicles in a dangerous state. We can blame our government and the ACCC for this situation.
@RockDAhouse if this repair cost you, i’d document the problem you had in a nice letter of claim and send it to Holden Australia with a clear statement of your demands ($$) and a time frame for them to respond in the affirmative before you take the issue to small claims. Clearly, in my mind (and I could be wrong) the repairer should have had access to TSB’s and recall notices and thus diagnosed the issue as being Holden’s problem and hand balled it to them. But bacause such info is problematic or time consuming to get hold of, maybe your non Holden repairer was unable to advise appropriately (but I hope you kept the old parts). In such instances, Holden has a moral duty to pay for your repairs even when done by non Holden repairers. It can take a little time to form the docs in an appropriate way and there is a cost to lodge a small claim so you need to weigh up the benefits to you. But if Holden is too sack to send anyone to the small claims court then the usual process is a summary judgment against Holden. But likely Holden won’t like to fight this issue over $400-$500 on something that is a clear recall os. However it’s your call if you want to bang heads with manufacturers.
Oh, and not knowing the electrical circuits involved, fretting corrosion implies intermittent connections and disconnections which could possibly compromise parts on either end of the connector, so if Holden states the recall was on part A and not the part B that you replaced, i’d ask for documentary proof that part B which is electrically connected to part A can’t be damaged by fretting corrosion. If they did their investigations of the problem correctly, such internal docs would discuss such issues (and if one goes to court there is a discovery process though i’m not sure if it’s done in small claims).
My vote (and I don’t have one) is take them to the cleaners and hammer them for all our sakes