OWNING A CHEVROLET SS

If you know your cars, you know that the 2014-2017 Chevy SS was a barely changed Holden VF Commodore from Australia. It's a big (by today's standards) sedan with a quentissentially American V-8 up front driving the rear wheels. When I found out Holden would stop producing them in late-2017 along with all other Australian production, I went out and got one of the last ones in my area.

In the same vein as the Jag Cost Page, this page will be dedicated to my ownership experience with the car. Here you will find:

If you've stumbled across this page and are interested in learning more about the SS, head over to the SS Forums site.


Converting the Chevrolet SS to a Holden

Other than swapping the dashboard and steering around and some changes to satisfy US safety regulations, the SS is basically the same car as the Commodore. Oh, yeah. There's the Chevy emblems. For the 2014-2016 model years, you could choose an option package that left the Holden badging on the car. Grille and trunk badges, wheel caps and horn pad. This option disappeared for 2017, but you can still get the required parts from various sources around the internet for a DIY conversion. This information here documents the various actions required to make that conversion.


Grille

The official method for doing this is to remove the bumper then pull out the grille. Using information I found on the Chevy SS Forums, I was able to do it without disassembling the front-end of the car. Total time: about 1 hour.

Printable Instructions


Wheel Caps

These are pretty easy to do. Take off the wheel, push the old cap out from the rear, pop the new one in and put the wheel back on. Easy peasy. Why not just pop the cap out with the wheel on? Because there's 20 tabs holding it on (automotive engineers love their tabs). You'll probably scar the wheel or damage the old cap. Total time per wheel is about 5-6 minutes. Unless you wash the brake dust off the inside of the wheel like I did. They look really good. Wheel nuts are 22mm and torque is 190 N m.


Horn Pad

The hardest part of this is getting the clips to release. Once you figure out how that works, it's pretty straight forward and the final result adds a nice touch.

Printable Instructions


Rear Badge

I had this one done by a local body shop. While I probably could have done this myself, I didn't want to take the chance of damaging my paint due to my inexperience. So I had a local body shop do the removal of the Chevy badge. They had it off and the adhesive residue cleaned off in less than 5 minutes. Didn't even charge me. A little extra cleaning of the area and the badge was on.


Key Fob

This was actually one of the more harder things to do. Mainly because my big meat hooks were working with something pretty small. But moving the guts of a Chevy key fob into a Holden key fob can be done. Sure, nobody is else is going to see it. But what the heck...

Printable Instructions



Cost of Ownership

This section will chronicle the cost of maintaining the SS. I won't be logging every fuel fillup, oil change, etc. Instead I'll focus on any repairs and and non-routine servicing.

Date Mileage Activity Cost
Sep 2017 6 Bought the car. Several thousand below sticker.
Apr 2018 2,700 New right front wheel. See, my teenage daughter and one of her pals decided to sneak the car out for a ride around the block one day when no one was home. Whoever the driver was (she ain't telling) managed to slide the front right wheel up against a curb giving it some mighty ugly curb rash. Got the new wheel and the daughter paid for it via a $100 down and $200 per month installment plan. The old wheel is going to be converted into a full sized spare. $650
Nov 2019 12,948 Diagnose faults. Had a few things crop up around the same time. First, the Service Stabilitrack fault light came on then went off a coulpe of times. Second, the radio head unit started randomly locking up (which also causes the other sounds like the door chime and turn signals to not work). Then the front passenger seat heater stopped working. They found no issue with the Stabilitrack system. The seat heater issue was caused by a loose connector under the seat; not sure how that happened. And the radio issue was resolved by replacing the head unit completely. Evidently tech bulletin 17-NA-111 covers a lot of issues with these head units and the fix action is to replace the whole thing. $0 (covered by warranty)
Mar 2020 14,787 Collision repair. I was sitting in a left turn lane waiting for the light to change when I was rear-ended by a Rent-A-Center van. The hit wasn't all that hard, just hard enough to screw up the rear bumper cover. Their insurance covered the repairs but it would have cost almost $2,200 because they had to order a new bumper cover, paint it and then install it. Of the cost, $733 was for parts and $1130 was for labor. $0
Aug 2023 38,755 Wheel Bearing. Over the prior several months a whining drone started coming from the rear. Louder at higher speeds; didn't change in the corners or with different types of pavement. Turned out the right rear wheel bearing was going out. $0 - Covered under extended warranty. Would have cost $392 for the part and $100 for labor (the rates the dealer got paid by the warranty and the rates a normal person would pay are definitely different).
Aug 2023 38,755 Cruise Control switch. Also noticed recently that when cruise was on and I increase or decreased the speed it would randomly skip one mph. For example, go from 65 to 67, skipping 66. The little rocker switch had an intermittent fault in it. $0 - Covered under extended warranty. Would have cost $34 for the switch and $60 for labor (the rates the dealer got paid by the warranty and the rates a normal person would pay are definitely different).