IMI Magazine

Vehicle recalls

It’s the sort of bad publicity to give a car company boss nightmares for a week. A national newspaper story headlined ‘The Combustible Corsa’, along with pictures of a burned out Vauxhall (not the car pictured here) and the upset couple for whom things could have been much worse.

The Daily Mail report appeared in August, but to be fair to Vauxhall an official recall was launched 18 months earlier.
A website run by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA), which monitors recalls, warned that more than 217,000 vehicles “could be affected”. VOSA explained that the problem could be triggered “by moisture ingress at the ABS connector…this can enter through the ground wiring connection, which can lead to the ABS not functioning correctly, overheating within the connector, and in extreme cases (causing) a fire”.

But the Corsa isn’t alone. In VOSA’s recall bulletin for the first half of 2007 there are 16 other car manufacturer call-backs prompted by a potential fire hazard. And that doesn’t include recalls involving fuel leaks. Together, they’re just a small percentage of the 117 campaigns started between January and June this year. The 2006 total was 220, the highest on record, and it could easily be topped by Christmas.

A VOSA spokesman explained that with just 109 for the whole of 1996, recalls are clearly on the rise. “The main reason is that in the interests of safety and customers, manufacturers are very keen to address any problems that arise,” he said.

That’s all well and good, but surely the more important question is this – what’s happening during the design, R&D and manufacturing process that’s allowing faulty cars to come off the production lines in the first place? Is it pressure to reduce costs, a desire to cut development times to get a car to market quicker than a rival, or too many new models so the quality assurance budget is being spread too thinly?

Dr Peter Wells, a senior researcher at the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff Business School, said: “The core issue is the complexity of the vehicles, and particularly the interface between the traditional mechanical components and the more modern electrical ones.

Component sourcing
“The former have got more reliable; the problem is with the latter, either in terms of hardware or software,” he explained. But that’s not the only factor that’s driving up recalls. Wells believes the financial pressure on car companies means if there’s a change in component sourcing strategy, mistakes get made. And they don’t always become apparent before a new model goes on sale.

“The number of models, body styles and variants has more than doubled in the last 10 years and that means the manufacturing environment has become more complex,” continued Wells.

He reckons the increase in platform-sharing – where one basic architecture can be spread over, say, four brands, seven models and 30 or more variants – is a factor. So rather than standardisation of parts leading to a decrease in manufacturing faults, it actually works the other way. “If there’s a problem, it affects many more vehicles over a number of brands, and each gets its own recall campaign,” he said.

Forensic expert Pat Cox wondered how many vehicles needed to be identified as having a problem to warrant a recall. “Is it one, 10 or a thousand?” asked Cox, who worked at the Fire Service College before setting up his own consultancy.
According to latest government figures, rescue services were called out to more than 62,000 vehicle fires in the 12 months to June of last year. “In my experience, many of those may be related to poorly maintained vehicles and the occasional botched d-i-y job where someone has cut into a wiring harness, for example,” said Cox. “But others are likely to be the result of inherent design flaws – there were a couple of fires on newish trucks recently where the cause was traced to metal fatigue.”

LPG tanks
Cox cited poor harness joins and multi-point ignition switches as other potential hazard areas and expressed concern at the placing of “doughnut-shaped” LPG tanks in dual fuel vehicles. “They’re designed to fit into the spare tyre compartment which just happens to be in the crumple zone!”

Nigel Wonnacott, head of communications at the SMMT, said that despite the billions of pounds spent on testing, carmakers can never give a 100 per cent guarantee that ‘safety critical’ problems won’t arise. “In an ideal world, there would be no need for safety recalls. And remember, not every car that has a recall notice is unsafe. It may just need a check as part of a suspect batch. However, the fact that a robust safety net for the unforeseen exists should be a reassurance to motorists,” he said.

As to why there’s a rise in recalls, Wonnacott denies it’s a question of cost-cutting or reducing development times. “It’s more a demonstration of a vehicle manufacturer’s willingness to remain compliant with the VOSA Code of Practice on safety defects, and address any problems which arise within ever more complex products.”

Generally, a recall doesn’t hurt a car manufacturer financially because the likely costs of any remedial work are built into the list price of the car.

But what about the price paid in terms of bad publicity or unhappiness of owners? The result could be a drop in customers buying the affected product or others from the same brand.

Bob Johnson is a professor at Warwick Business School and an expert in ‘service recovery’ – the posh name for cleaning up the fan after it gets caked in the brown stuff. He said recalls of any sort, not just automotive, can be seen as an opportunity for a company to demonstrate how serious it is about safety and quality.

Undermining the brand
“Cars are complicated and I think most people accept that things go wrong. Companies can get away with this once or twice in a period of time – and I’m not sure how long that period would be – but not more than that. There’s no doubt they do undermine a brand, but it’s not the ‘going wrong’ per se which can damage an image. It’s how the company deals with it,” he explained.

Johnson said that a fault serious enough to warrant a recall wasn’t going to stop people buying cars, but would lead them to switch brands. “As a long-standing Subaru driver with no problems I’m likely to stick with the brand. My two daughters, who both have Renault Clios, have been affected by recalls and are less likely to buy one again,” he said.
The bottom line is there will always be recalls. But while one bad headline in the Daily Mail isn’t great for business, in these days of transient media attention, it’s literally here today gone tomorrow.

Richard Yarrow