by Most people probably don’t read their owner’s manual, but a lack of one has sparked two separate recalls at General Motors. It impacts over 3,500 vehicles from the 2026 model year.
The largest recall involves 3,408 Silverado 1500, 2500, and 3500 trucks, which “may not have received an owner’s manual during production.”
More: The Average Owner’s Manual Takes Over Six Hours To Read
GM became aware of the issue in October when a dealer reported that four Silverado 2500 pickup trucks were missing their owner’s manual. This led to an investigation, which determined that workers didn’t follow directions and failed to include an owner’s manual in the dealer pack.
Since this was simply an oversight, the fix is pretty straightforward as dealers will provide impacted customers with an owner’s manual. Notifications are scheduled to go out early next month.
A High-Tech Headache
The second recall involves 94 Cadillac Vistiqs and is notably more high-tech. As the government explained, “The radio may not have been set to the correct status to download the electronic owner’s manual during production.”
This presumably refers to the infotainment system and an employee discovered vehicles left the plant without the “radio” being put into transport mode. The mode is important as it “automatically triggers a reboot of the radio which, among other things, automatically downloads the electronic owner’s manual to the vehicle and allows owners to log in to their myCadillac app at delivery.”
Cadillac initially tried to address the issue with a technical service bulletin and an e-mail to customers, explaining how to reboot the radio by holding the call-end/mute button for 15 seconds.
The company didn’t believe the problem was serious as “even without manual reboot, the radio will self-reboot after 24 hours of accumulated driving time.”
However, GM eventually decided to conduct a recall and they’ve received 12 potential complaints related to the issue.
To address the problem, dealers will reset the radio to trigger an automatic download of the owner’s manual. It’s also worth noting these vehicles don’t have a condensed printed manual, with government mandated information, like some other vehicles.
