2017 Chevy Colorado 2.8 Duramax Z71 DEF Failure

Ouis M. Mouffok · October 30, 2018

Dears,

I bought my 2017 Chevy Colorado Duramax Z71 brand new and I just love it. I was super satisfied with the performance and features of the truck. Due to the nature of my job, I had to move outside the U.S for a long mission to Africa, so I took my truck with me. Here started my nightmare. Just few days of use, I had the famous warning message regarding the quality of gas (DEF). I changed several brands of DEF but no success! I read somewhere that the shelf life of the product is key for the quality of the fluid. Now my truck is kind of locked, I am allowed to drive 6 Miles/h, it means it is not working. The worse thing is that there is no GM, Chevrolet store to assist. I was thinking to delete the whole DEF system if possible since the location where I am based is not regulated by the gas emissions. I will be very grateful if you could assist as I am suffering without my car. Thanks for your help.

Brianibew · October 30, 2018

Are you sure it’s related to the quality of the DEF? You need to get a code reader and plug into your truck and see if there are any other codes present. It may take calling a GM dealership and ordering some DEF directly from them and shipped to your location. If you can, siphon or drain out the DEF that is currently in the truck so you are not diluting down bad DEF with good DEF, if that’s indeed the problem.

bshort · February 26, 2019

Better get it deleted and tuned. Maybe a GDE tune would be your easiest remedy.

Abraham Romero · April 11, 2020

hello I have a problem with my chevrolet colorado 2.8 2017 this is indicating to me that the quality of the def is low but I already put the liquid of gm and the problem continues I connected an autel and it does not have active codes and I did some parameter restarts but I did tests to def system and everything is normal but the screen follows the same problem who could help me.

love earth · October 26, 2022

We bought the 2016 Chevy Colorado with a Duramax engine. We expected it to last a very long time. There have been problems with the DEF since the first year. Unfortunately we didn't start tracking it closely until the truck was 6 years old with 130k miles on it. We have spent almost 10,000$ trying to figure out what was wrong with it. We went to 3 different dealerships. G HQ will not do anything about this issue. I talked with them multiple times. The last time today. I was told by their rep, Laura, to "get out of the truck and into a new one". Of course the price and availability of trucks is ridiculous right now. When I told her we would not be buying a GM/Chevy product, she said "I don't blame you". WTH. Issues with emissions and DEF are well known and GM will not fix or take responsibility.