April 16, 2018
www.usedcarnews.com
Recalls See Decline By Ted Craig
The good news for the auto industry is that recalls are inally starting to decline. The number of units afected by recalls in 2017 reached the lowest level since 2013, said Neil Steinkamp, managing director at the Stout advisory irm, during a presentation to the Society of Automotive Analysts. There were no re-
paigns involved fewer than 10,000 units. The reason for any recall campaign is to get the problems ixed, Steinkamp said, and regulators are taking a longer look at this aspect. There were three recall campaigns that reached 100 percent remedied in 2017. However, one was a Mercedes recall of a single vehicle. Recall completion becomes much
States Look at Recalls RECALLS: The biggest issue facing the auto industry remains recalls to repair airbags, such as those with the Ford Fusion, above, but other problems are arising, such as recalls to fix repairs made in previous recalls. That is what happened with the Nissan Jukes, top right.
calls involving more than 1.5 million units last year. “What we’re looking at is a return to non-Takata levels,” Steinkamp said. The bad news is that as a percentage of all recalls, airbag recalls are increasing. Takata gets the most attention, but there have been many others. Steinkamp said the big recalls receive the headlines, but the small recalls add up and impact the industry. Just over half of all recall cam-
more challenging with older vehicles. “You’re doing outreach to people you’re not used to doing outreach to,” he said. The industry is still responding to the crisis of 2013-16, which saw the Takata and General Motors ignition switch recalls, Steinkamp said. But more needs to be done. One improvement is widening the methods of contacting drivers, said Richard Rosen, founder of Convergence Marketing.
Courts and lawmakers are pushing used-car dealers to start disclosing recalls. A California appeals court recently judged a woman could go forward with a lawsuit against CarMax Inc., claiming the company wasn’t transparent enough about the recall on an ’08 Elantra she purchased. CarMax plans to appeal to the state’s Supreme Court. George Hofer, an economist at the University of Richmond, said the worst case for CarMax is they have to be more speciic on the nature of each open recall on a vehicle, including its consequences. “My real concern is that we start going down a slippery slope where later, in subsequent cases, open recall vehicles are court-determined to be non-salable,” Hofer said. Meanwhile, New Jersey legislators are advancing a bill that re-
quires dealerships to notify buyers of recalls on used cars. Paula Frendel, executive director of the New Jersey Independent Automobile Dealers Association, said in a written statement that this bill provides signiicant new protections to consumers and the transparency they expect but also gives dealers that sell to the retail public protections from liability for the actions of others beyond their control and allows them to continue to operate proitably. Anthony Bush, who works with New Jersey IADA on legislative issues, agrees that it is a good bill and says, “a blanket rule that would bar sales of any vehicles with an open recall would negatively, and potentially unfairly, impact a dealer’s costs and inventory, without making the public any safer in many instances.”
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