Massive Recalls

[stevenjb]

Chrysler at 500,000 and now Honda at 166,000 (USA) plus over 500,000 (China) - you wonder where the quality control standards are on any vehicle produced recently.

Those extended warranties, even on the "reliable" vehicles are looking more and more tempting. ;-]

[motoguy128]

Manufacturers these days are pushed hard to offer more features and content... mostly electronic at lower prices. My parents '89 Ford Taurus had so many recalls, we lost count. It seemed like for the first 2 years it was in hte dealer for a recall more often than oil changes. That was the LAST american car they ever bought. The last 5 cars have been Toyotas... no recalls or warranty claims on any of those.

I agree... the extended warranty is looking tempting.

[proxim2020]

I'm not too worried. When you produce a lot of vehicles the same way and need to issue a recall, then you have to call a lot back. Most massive/mandatory recalls deal with design flaws within the components that have been installed. Like when Ford needed to recall a bunch of F-150's. Because of the way the cruise control sensor was designed, it could cause a vehicle fire once you shut off your truck. Several people down here lost their homes because their truck caught on fire in the driveway. Most minor/voluntary recalls deal with issues that are related to things that could've been caught in QC. Things like, this may not work correctly or this may have been installed in the wrong location.

[Ever Victorious]

Agreed. Recalls also have no bearing on warranty. Any vehicle may be taken in for an active recall campaign as long as it is on the list of affected vehicles and has "reasonable" mileage (some MFR's define this as 100,000)

I remember buying a used Geo Storm back in the day, and took it into the Geo dealership a week later because I found out the original owner never took it in for a seatbelt latch recall. Car was 7 years and 123,000 miles old, and I wasn't hassled at all.

And to reiterate the point of flaws that QC can't possibly catch... my wife's Tucson had one recall shortly after it came out, because the programming for the ESP program would reset the values whenever the speed dropped below 2 mph (which it is supposed to), but it was later found that, regardless of steering wheel position, it always set the steering wheel position value to "0". Thus, if your wheel were pointed when you were stopped, the truck would constantly think you were turning when you were actually going straight. The corrective action for this was to flash-program the computer... there was no physical problem that QC could have found.