Petition Against Hill Start Assist and Skip Shift in Camaros.

Ok, so I’m still in college and I live with my brother who bought a 2013 Camaro SS with manual transmission last winter. At the time, neither of us knew that Hill Start Assist or Skip Shift existed and I wish we still didn’t. We might not be so upset about these features if they each actually worked…. No, actually, we still would. Hill Start Assist on his Camaro pretty much makes you have to burn the clutch to make the car move. That or you can pull the park break up on click to make HSA shut off, but then you have to hear that annoying warning sound. More than once when I was trying to turn out into traffic, Hill Start Assist has held me back so long that by the time I got the damn car to move, I had to use all 430 horsepower just to accelerate safely into traffic. Even if it weren’t a safety issue though, it’s infuriating to have something take control of the car away from me like that, which leads me to Skip Shift. When I want to shift gears, I don’t want to have some bastard computer block me and distract me from the road while I cuss the car and rev the engine to make it let me have the gear I want. If it wouldn’t void the warranty, I would take those blocking solenoids, or whatever they are, out of the car and smash them to bits with a hammer just to send the remains of them to GM to show them what I think of their nanny computer intrusion in my driving.

Ok, I’m done explaining the issues in my usual irritated ranting style, so here’s what I propose. I would like to start some kind of petition to have sent to GM to request or demand a proper way of disabling both of these features on demand by the driver. I don’t want a complete removal of Hill Start Assist, just a re-calibration so that it works properly and an either aesthetically pleasing integrated switch or hidden switch to disable the feature. I do mean switch too, not a button that will have to be pressed every time you get in the car. I want to be able to turn the feature off and leave it off if I so please. (Which I do) As for the Skip Shift, I want that crap gone entirely, but since I’m sure it was done to please our nanny state government’s CAFE standards, I at least want a switch for disabling it just like the one I want for Hill Start Assist.

Let’s be honest here, these two features seem like they could cause wrecks, and that’s when they’re working as designed. Imagine what the failure modes could be. If HSA breaks, will it lock your breaks up when you’re going 70 mph on the highway? If skip shift breaks, will it permanently block you out of gear or push in out of a gear you’re already in and cause you to lose mobility and get hit. There is no telling what the failure modes could be, or even if the seemingly obvious working safety hazards of the features will really cause wrecks, but the one thing for sure is that these two features are hated by a large number of Camaro owners and apparently versions of them on older Corvettes were hated too.

So, if anyone is with me on this, how do you think we should go about getting signatures and agreeing on a message for the petition? Would a facebook page dedicated to the cause work, or will Facebook just claim that it’s some kind of slander and delete it? Ideas?