A RASH OF RECENT VEHICLE RECALLS SIGNALS A TIPPING POINT FOR THE AUTO INDUSTRY
Safety recalls have been a fact of automotive life for almost half a century. But they’ve taken on a whole new dimension in 2014, which is likely to be remembered as a tipping point in future approaches to auto safety — and, perhaps, in the relationships between OEMs and dealers.
As this is written, a group of Toronto dealers have reportedly filed suit against General Motors over the knock-on effects of that company’s recent recalls.
The current state of affairs didn’t materialize overnight. It’s been brewing for decades but it only became a cause celebre about five years ago with Toyota’s massive recall of more than 8-million vehicles in response to allegations of unintended acceleration.
The sheer magnitude of that action and the period over which it played out kept the mainstream media buzzing for months.
It gave them a second act earlier this year, when the U.S. Justice Department fined the company $1.2 billion as a first step towards dismissal of criminal charges for failing to report those “defects” to the government’s safety agency in a timely matter. And that was after already paying approximately $34 million in fines to the safety agency.
HIGH PROFILE
The Justice Department also found fault with the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency (NHTSA), ensuring that it would take a harder line in forcing recalls in the future. Clearly, Toyota’s record fine was intended to be a message to other automakers.
“Other car companies should not repeat Toyota’s mistake,” said U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder Jr. Subsequent events have made it just as clear that the message was received.
The timing of the announcement came, not coincidentally, during the early stages of what has become an even bigger recall nightmare for General Motors. That horror story began with a recall for ignition switches that could be jarred out of the run position but has since mushroomed to encompass more than 20-million vehicles for a variety of maladies. It even led to a brief stop-sales order on the Chevrolet Cruze — GM’s best-selling car in this country.
In the climate that prevailed before the Toyota precedent, many of those recalls probably wouldn’t have happened. In fact, they didn’t, for many were already known problems at the time. But in the hypersensitive safety environment that exists today, there’s no possibility of any grey area in deciding whether or not to initiate a recall.
In this new paradigm, there is zero tolerance for anything that might possibly cause a safety concern, no matter how random it may seem.
Not just Toyota and GM, but virtually every automaker selling in the U.S. has needed to reassess its internal processes for both identifying and taking action on potential safety issues. As a result, the rate of recalls by almost all manufacturers has soared. They’re being announced almost daily and many more are sure to follow as the companies work through their files of issues previously considered to be marginal.
THE COMMONALITY FACTOR
Among those recalls is one related to airbags using inflators manufactured by Takata, a highly respected first-tier supplier to the industry. Such suppliers are relied on increasingly to develop, test and supply components and complete systems to the OEMs. By using common components that are invisible to consumers across multiple applications cost savings can be realized at every level and solutions can be broadly shared.
The inflator in the recalled airbags is one such component. Consequently, vehicles from many different manufacturers have needed to be recalled. This example highlights the downside of such common engineering and parts sourcing. When something goes wrong the consequences are massive even though the actual number of failures may be miniscule with respect to the numbers built.
Some cases among the current recalls certainly give the appearance of negligence along the way, whether at an individual level or just as a result of corporate culture.
Others, however might never have been reasonably predicted no matter how thorough the development and testing process.
That’s an important point to be considered in the current climate of finger-pointing. Not every so-called defect is the result of negligence. The permutations and combinations of climatic, age and use effects on any product are infinite in number and to ensure against all possibilities is simply impossible.
The upside of what’s happening now is that manufacturers must make even greater efforts to ensure they’ve made every reasonable effort to foresee and forestall safety-related malfunctions or failures. In the meantime, get used to having your service bays filled with recall work.
