Are The Automakers Looking Out For You OR Are They Just Covering Their Butts When It Comes To Recalls?

They are covering their butts and saving their reputations.

1. They can save potential lawsuits if they perform a recall. Since most people do not perform minor recalls, the automaker has publicly served noticed and put the ownership back on the owner. Now do not think recalls are a cheap way out. They are tremendously expensive to do.

2. Also recalls are NOT typically included in reliability studies. So a car can be recalled 5 times over 3 years and it will typically not affect the reliability rating. Where something as mundane as a bad spark plug coil pack will affect you score dramatically.

An automanufacturer actually admiting to a fault and determining a recall is a very rare thing. This issue back in 2010 of Toyota actually doing the recall only came to being because the media hounded them on it. There are plenty of issues with other cars that deserve a recall yet the manufacturer refuses to accept the fault and usually places it on the owner...along with the denial of it being a warrentied issue.

Take for example Mazda, specifically the 2007 Mazda CX-7. There is a known issue of a poor design to the Turbocharged 2.3L engine where that the timing chains were cheaply made. As everyone who knows cars knows that if your timing chain goes...your engine goes SQUISH. Well it seems Mazda found a niffty solution to not covering this issue which happened under most peoples manufacturers warrenty.

It seems that another major design flaw was how oil flowed throught the turbo and how hot the turbo actually got. Seems the oil would pool in the turbo upon engine shut down. This oil would bake and become sludge. This sludge was the reason that the turbo malfunctioned and the timing of the was thrown off.

I know I know...it makes no sense at all, but that was Mazda's justification. It didn't matter if you used synthetic and managed to do your oilchanges regularly as scheduled, and had them done at a mazda dealer...they would always have the mechanic take the engine apart and have them find sludge so that they could refuse the repair and replacement of an entire engine. Even if you proved to mazda that sludge in the engine would not cause a timing chain to break...it made no difference. Mazda refused to cover it because it would have required an entire engine redesign when all they really had to do was do a recall on the timing chain itself.

This was just one example of a big issue that the manufacturer knew about yet found a way to pass the issue onto the customer so that they didn't have to foot the bill.

A corporation will always find a way to deny fault and hide behind their lawyers to ensure they don't have to spend any money in repairing a shoddy product. Paying for a couple lawyers is always a cheaper option than paying for hundreds of thousands of mechanics and new parts.

All products have recalls,not just automobiles. Nothing mass produced can be perfect.

For you, for you!!

Don't recall = bastards who are only in it for the money and don't have our interests at heart.

Recall = bastards who are only in it for themselves and are trying to cover their ass/protect profits.


Damned if you do....

What sort of question is this? C'mon...is Coke making soda for our health or even just to quench our thirst? Car companies, just like any other company exist to make money. Of course they are covering themselves/protecting their interest - even if I assume engineers are issuing recalls because they believe in fixing problems and get paid for it. Car makers (excluding well-documented bean counters at Ford in the past) also don't want their customers to die because dead customers don't return (unless Ford decides to sell coffins on the side).