Filed under: Government/Legal, Recalls, Safety
Recent Rises in Recall Numbers A Cause For Alarm
Preliminary indications suggest there may be an all-time recall record in 2013.
The announcements seem to be coming almost every day, if not more frequently: a million-plus Jeeps, a quarter-million Hondas, another million Toyotas. Last year saw a sharp reversal of the long, downward trend in automotive recalls and while it’s still too early to say where things will wind up when 2013 winds down, preliminary indications from the first half of the year suggest there’ll be another increase, if not an all-time record.
Significantly, automakers recalled roughly the same number of vehicles as they sold in 2012, about 14.5 million, notably with Toyota and Honda, two brands traditionally known for their quality and reliability, at the top of the chart. In fact, those two makers have led the list, in terms of individual vehicles recalled, for the last five years. And they were on track to do the same thing again in 2013 – Honda already targeting about 2 million vehicles for problems ranging from airbags to brakes to switch fires – if it weren’t for a series of big safety campaigns announced by Chrysler over the last month.
The most recent of these actually combined five separate recalls and covered about 840,000 vehicles, but it was dwarfed by the recall of 1.6 million Jeeps announced – reluctantly – in June. And that controversial campaign raises some serious questions about what’s behind the recent rise in the number of recalls.
Paul A. Eisenstein is Publisher of TheDetroitBureau.com and a 30-year veteran of the automotive beat. His editorials bring his unique perspective and deep understanding of the auto world to Autoblog readers on a regular basis. This story was reprinted with permission from the author and TheDetroitBureau.com.
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