How vehicle recalls work
Cars are incredibly complicated things made up of thousands of parts that all rely on each other. It takes just one of those components to be poorly designed or manufactured and everything can be thrown out of kilter. Yet somehow, most cars roll out of the factory and give years of use without the need for a manufacturer to intervene. That’s not always the case though, because when the process does go wrong, car makers sometimes have to recall their products to put right a design or manufacturing fault. Occasionally these recalls make the headlines, as Toyota’s did back in 2009/2010 and more recently Volkswagen’s emissions scandal resulted in a high-profile campaign to fix its cars. In both cases neither fault led to in any casualties in the UK – or even any accidents. Despite this, huge numbers of cars were recalled to implement fixes. Both of these examples illustrate a key feature of the recalls system; in most cases a car is recalled in case there’s a problem, not because there definitely is one. So if a manufacturer notices that several examples of one (or more) of its models are affected by the same potentially dangerous fault, it can recall them to fix things. One current high-profile case is Vauxhall, which has been forced to take action because its Zafiras have been found to have a habit of spontaneously combusting.