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Hi,

I just read in the newspapers that Honda had recalled its cars for a manufacturing defect in a Power Window Switch. The also mention that the switch has not caused any problem or failure till now, but since they have found a manufacturing defect, they will recall and replace. Now it's bad that manufacturing defects do crop up in cars, but I think the Japanese Car Manufacturers at least own up responsibility and recall and replace the faulty parts.

Compare that with Indian Manufacturers. I own a Scorpio 2003 Non-CRDE and it is a known fact that the brake boosters in some lots of Scorpios were defective, and this was confirmed to me by an engineer from Mahindra who I met at a free service camp. My brake booster failed near Rohtang pass, and it was a lucky escape. Others on this forum will be able to bring to notice numerous other Manufacturing Defects specially in Tata and Mahindra vehicles. Sadly even though there are numerous times that vehicles have manufacturing defects, we have never heard of a recall for replacement of parts from Mahindra or Tata. They will wait for the defective part to fail, and when that does happen, and the customer takes the vehicle to the Service Center he is happily told that this was a manufacturing defect.

The question that comes to my mind is - Will Indian Auto manufacturers ever own up to the manufacturing defects in parts and their vehicle ? Will they ever be responsible enough to publicly acknowledge defects and call for recall of vehicles to fix these defects ?

Another thing that comes to mind is, if manufacturers take responsibility world over, why not in India. The answer it seems is this. If a manufacturing defect causes a mishap in sat USA, the company will have to pay millions of dollars as compensations and fines. In India these companies know that even if there are mishaps due to manufacturing defects, and even if people die, they are not going to be held accountable, so why spend money on recalls.

If there are any high-ups from the Indian Auto Industry reading this, it will be nice to hear their views on this. I am sure the Auto Industry in India aspires to become world class, but to achieve this, they first need to look at issues like this very seriously.

Styler

You can call Maruti an "Indian" manufacturer; it did recall a decent no. of Swifts, DZires and Ritz diesels some time back.

But yes, it remains to be seen whether Tata/Mahindra would accept manufacturer liability and enforce recalls if defective parts are found.

Recalls happen mostly when manufacturers realize they could face huge lawsuits if manufacturing defects are found; something not popular in India. So, I guess it's intertwined.

Just so to refresh your memory, Tata when they released Indica V1 and when found out that there were problems with the V1 version came with V2. At that time they had called old Indica V1 owners to get some of the stuff fitted and changed (especially around alignment problems in V1 which lead to irregular tyre wear and tear), apart from some other issues.

I remember Tata scrip went down on that press release as it was estimated to be costing close to 30K per car. Folks in the auto industry appreciated this move as this would inspire confidence on brand Tata. Post that fix Indicas never gave alignment problems.

In recent past, Tata called up all NANO owners for some additional fittings to be made to the exhaust insulation(or what was that?) and faulty ignition key hole. That was also a recall of sorts,quite headlines grabbing one though.

I guess we need stronger regulations in place. Some kind of online complaint forum / phone based system run by a government agency where people can complain about a particular defect in their car. Then there should be a rule like:-

If (number of particular complaints / total number of models sold) = 0.5 , the automaker is forced to issue a recall.

They will have to do the recalls or else their reputation is at risk. The more earlier they do when they feel there is an issue the better rather than wait for an incident to happen and hit headlines giving a bad image to brand quality. This will also in some ways affect the future launches by the car manufacturer.

It is not applicable to just the Tatas, Marutis etc but to all car manufacturers in India. This will ask for the manufacturers to invest more in R&D and qaulity process if they want to avoid any recalls.

According to this logic, Honda shouldn't be recalling its cars in India - as it is doing right now.
Honestly I don't think the recall decision has anything to do with the origin of the manufacturer. Its just a management decision based on their long term strategy, methinks (We have a VW Polo which suffer from the driver side power window issue - a known issue among many Polos, still no recall?stupid:)

I think it is more of a quality control issue. Most of the parts are sourced from various vendors. Like in the case of the Scorpio, the Brake Booster which was sourced from a vendor and had a manufacturing defect and was prone to failure. Mahindra should improve their quality control so that all parts sourced from vendors are thoroughly checked before being passed for installation into vehicles.

A friend who works on Lumax Vehicle Light manufacturing facility told me this. He told me that they manufacture lights for TATA vehicles, and for Honda , Maruti Vehicles.
When they send finished lights to the manufacturers, he tells me that the rejection rate from TATA is 1-5 % and with Japanese Manufacturers the rejection rate is as high as 20 %. The lights are manufactured in the same plant. The Japanese Quality control systems are such that even if there is a miniscule dot sized bubble in the moulded plastic they would reject it. With Tata everything passes. When this is the difference in each part, it's a no-brainer how the quality and reliability of the entire vehicle is also different.

Styler

The "Burning" issue that comes to mind is the Nano, had it been anywhere else, the plant and production would have been shut down and total investigation would have been ordered and blame pinned and those responsible jailed. Nano has been self immolating at such metronome frequencies; has there been any hue and cry: NO. We are a very tolerant people and wait till someone pays with his/her life till some semblance of an investigation is ordered. Also there are so many cars run on LPG that have caught fire: whats been done: Nothing.