GM’s Recall Headache Won’t Go Away

General Motors (NYSE:GM) has issued a recall for about 33,700 vehicles over a software malfunction, just on the heels of a possible recall expansion earlier this month for faulty brake lights problems, which could affect up to a million or so cars.

The latest problem is a software glitch that could cause the transmission to slip from manual mode back into automatic. Although no reports of injuries or crashes have been reported, the company is jumping ahead of the curve to prevent those issues from arising. The seemingly negligible problem could potentially be more serious at speed: if the transmission slips into automatic mode without the driver being aware, the engine braking effect that occurs in manual mode is suddenly gone, and regular users of manual mode who have built a certain reliance on the feature may be expecting a more dramatic stopping effect.

About 26,582 of the vehicles within the recall’s scope are in the U.S., and the remaining are spread out through Canada, China, the Middle East, and Mexico. The cars affected are the Cadillac SRX and Buick LaCrosse models…