Recalls puts owners at mercy of car makers

ALTHOUGH MOTOR vehicle recalls are an everyday fact of life, with hundreds of thousands of cars being called back in to have manufacturing defects fixed every year, there is no official monitoring of the situation in Ireland, where car companies are left entirely to their own internal devices when recalls are needed.

That’s in stark contrast to the US, where the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has a federal mandate to instigate recalls, to legally compel a car maker to carry one out and to levy fines if the recall is not done to its satisfaction.

“We have the authority to issue vehicle safety standards and to require manufacturers to recall vehicles that have safety-related defects or do not meet Federal safety standards . Since then, more than 390 million cars, trucks, buses, recreational vehicles, motorcycles and mopeds, as well as 46 million tires, 66 million pieces of motor vehicle equipment, and 42 million child safety seats have been recalled to correct safety defects,” says a NHTSA spokesperson.

In Ireland, the situation is very different. According to those in the Irish motor trade that we polled, no one can remember a recall ever having begun here. Always, the faults that trigger a recall have been discovered first in other markets and the directives have come here from the car makers’ head offices.

Statistically speaking, given Ireland’s tiny national car park, that’s hardly a surprise. The fact that we are a small island nation with short distances between urban centres and a benign climate would have an affect too, putting less stress on vehicle components than the snowy chill of northern Europe or Canada, or the arid heat of Africa or Australia.

But it is worrying that no Government department or agency seems to take more than a passing interest in such matters. The National Consumer Agency (NCA) says: “The NCA works closely with car manufacturers when a car recall notice comes to our attention. There is an obligation on manufacturers to ensure corrective action is taken where there is a safety risk to consumers. They are also obliged to inform the agency of any action taken due to safety issues. The NCA may place a notice on its website to make consumers aware of any recall.”

There seems, though, to be a lack of the legal onus on car makers that exists in the US. The Department of the Environment, in spite of being the agency that car makers must contact to get the names and addresses of specific vehicle owners in order to contact them about a recall, says that “it would be the Department of Transport, if anyone, who would look after that.” The Department of Transport was not responding to messages when we tried to make contact.

The car makers are really only legally obliged to inform their head offices, which are required to inform the authorities in Brussels, which then pass on the fact that the recall is taking place to the Irish authorities.

So, what is protecting the consumer and making sure that recalls are carried out fully and in a prompt fashion? Nothing more than the internal quality checks of the car companies involved.

George Harbourne, managing director of Gowan Distributors, the Irish importer for Peugeot outlines the procedures used when a recall notice is issued. “When a problem is found, any fault, each dealer has to tell us and it’s fast-tracked straight to Peugeot head office. So any information from any Peugeot dealer is sent straight to Paris. So when a technician looks at a car, he or she opens a ticket on that car and it stays open until that problem is resolved.

“Some time ago, you would have had a huge amount of recalls. But there have been a very few this year, one of which was of one specific car. Some of these are ‘replace a radio component’ and we’ve done that. Some are merely to upload new software to the car’s systems. But there’s been no safety-related recall issue for us this year.”

The significant thing about the Peugeot system is that all recalls are treated the same. Whether it’s the radio, the paint or the brakes that are at fault, the same set-up is used and the same strict 100 per cent completion demand from France is enforced.

Down the road at Ford, things are slightly different. Here, recalls are divided into two lanes – one for urgent, safety-related issues that need to be tackled immediately and one for less significant items that can be dealt with over a longer time.

“Different models and model variants have different recall or service action campaigns attached. A service action is where a technical adjustment is needed for specific models but it is not deemed ‘urgent’ and can be looked after by our technicians on the next workshop visit. A recall is where there is an element of urgency in the technical adjustment and, in that case, we would be required to contact all of the owners of the affected vehicles. The majority of our campaigns would be related to service actions rather than recalls,” said chairman and MD of Ford Ireland, Eddie Murphy.

Most importantly, there is no strict legal requirement for Peugeot, Ford or any other Irish-based vehicle manufacturer or importer to inform any Government department that a recall is taking place. According to Murphy, “we would need to contact the Dept of Transport in order to get the addresses. We would then write to each vehicle owner asking them to bring their car to their local dealer to have the issue remedied. There are no other legal requirements in terms of contacting official bodies.”

Without any supervision of these recalls from an independent authority, we rely on the good intentions of car makers and their local operations to carry them out properly. That’s fine if they all are upstanding, but long experience of the capitalist system has shown that goodwill is no guarantor.