GM Faces Class Action After GM’s ‘Fixed’ Replacement Engines Die At 65mph

Picture this: you’re cruising at 65 mph, kids in the back, music on, when the truck suddenly goes quiet. No sputter, no warning lights—just a dash message telling you to shift into neutral and restart. You try. Nothing. You’re stuck in the middle lane while traffic blasts past on both sides. One owner put it bluntly: “I was stopped in the middle of the highway with my family in the truck.” That truck was a brand‑new GM, running the engine GM claimed it had already fixed.

Premium Price

These aren’t budget beaters limping along at the end of their lives. We’re talking Cadillac Escalades, GMC Sierras, Chevy Tahoes, and Suburbans—trucks and SUVs wearing stickers from $75,000 up past $130,000. Buyers paid luxury money expecting rock‑solid engineering. GM sold nearly 600,000 of these L87‑equipped rigs in the U.S. between 2021 and 2024. By the time the company publicly acknowledged a problem, more than 28,000 field complaints had piled up, over 14,000 of them describing a terrifying symptom: total power loss.

Three Strikes

GM’s timeline reads like a case study in denial. The first signs popped up in April 2021. An internal probe launched in early 2022, then quietly closed. Another started in mid‑2023. Closed again. A third in 2024. Same result: “no defect found.” All the while, owners kept filing reports about dead trucks and SUVs. Only when federal regulators opened their own investigation in early 2025 did GM finally pinpoint the culprit: contaminated crankshafts with out‑of‑spec dimensions coming from a supplier in Mexico.

Dead Engines

When the recall finally landed in April 2025, the fix sounded simple. About 97 percent of affected owners were told an oil change—from 0W‑20 to thicker 0W‑40—would take care of it. The other few percent got full engine replacements. Corporate messaging was clear: issue identified, problem solved. Dealers repeated that line to nervous customers. But then the replacement engines, built to the same basic design, started failing the same way. One owner recalled being told the “engine problems were fixed” in newer model years—only to watch the replacement die, too.

Same Factory

Independent teardown videos stripped away any illusion that this was overblown. Mechanics opened failed L87s and found the same gruesome pattern: all eight rod bearings wiped out, crank journals chewed up, oil turned dark with metal and debris. The root cause of the originals was sediment clogging oil passages in the crankshaft, starving bearings of lubrication. Replacement engines sourced from the same process showed the same carnage. That’s like swapping a broken lock with another from the same flawed batch. Regulators eventually logged dozens of post‑“fix” failures.

Brutal Numbers

The statistics behind the headlines are staggering. Regulators collected more than 1,000 reports of bearing failures linked to this engine family. Some came from vehicles that weren’t even included in the original recall. Officials counted crashes, injuries, and fires plausibly linked to the defect. GM’s own math suggested a failure rate far higher than what another major automaker saw in a comparable engine recall. These weren’t isolated flukes at extreme mileage, either—engines were dying practically out of the wrapper and well into normal use, often with zero warning beforehand.

Collateral Damage

The damage isn’t limited to broken hardware. Owners say trade‑in values plunged once the recall became public, wiping out equity on trucks they thought were safe bets. That thicker oil GM now requires isn’t free, either: it dings fuel economy, potentially adding hundreds or thousands in fuel costs over a vehicle’s life. Dealers are stuck juggling parts shortages, angry customers, and service bays clogged with major repairs. In court, multiple class actions have been consolidated into a single case, with lawyers arguing that the total financial exposure could reach the billion‑dollar mark.

New Rule

This recall sits near the top of the 2025 league table for drivetrain disasters, but its long tail may matter even more than the raw numbers. Regulators first opened, then closed, an investigation—only to reopen it months later after fresh post‑repair failures surfaced. That about‑face sends a clear message: a recall isn’t a get‑out‑of‑jail‑free card if the “fix” doesn’t actually fix anything. GM’s multi‑year delay between early complaints and a full recall is now the textbook example of how not to handle a defect when the data keeps getting worse.

Expanding Blast

The story also isn’t contained to one neat VIN range. Regulators are now scrutinizing earlier model years that share the same engine architecture but weren’t initially swept into the recall. Plaintiffs argue that GM’s remedy is fundamentally inadequate and that even replacement engines are failing. Meanwhile, brand‑new trucks and SUVs with the same L87 under the hood continue to roll off lots. A stop‑sale order froze certain older units in place, but newer vehicles with essentially the same powertrain face no such restriction—leaving buyers to wonder what, if anything, has really changed.

Expensive Lesson

Strip away the badges and paint, and a $130,000 Escalade shares its beating heart with a work‑spec pickup. When that shared engine has a systemic defect, the price tag doesn’t buy immunity. GM will likely have to sweeten the remedy—more replacement engines, longer warranties, maybe buybacks—to head off a legal ruling that could reshape how automakers respond to known issues. For owners, the unsettling takeaway is simple: if three separate internal probes supposedly found nothing, how hard was anyone really looking until regulators got involved?

Sources:
Hagens Berman Law , GM L87 V8 Engine Failure Class Action , May 15, 2025​
Top Class Actions , GM recall of defective engines is “inadequate,” class action lawsuit claims , May 27, 2025​
The Autopian , It Took GM More Than 28,000 Failed V8s Before Recalling Its L87 Engines, Now The Feds Are Investigating Whether The Fix “Failed” , January 20, 2026​
NHTSA / ODI , ODI RESUME: Engineering Analysis EA25‑007 (GM L87 Engine Bearing Failure) , October 27, 2025​
GM Authority , Consolidated GM 6.2L V8 L87 Engine Class Action Lawsuit Begins , March 3, 2026​
Nasdaq / RTTNews , NHTSA Expands Probe Into GM Vehicles Over Engine Failure Concerns , October 27, 2025