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CARSMULTIVERSEWatch a recall

We hold 46 recall notices whose authority record names a fault in forward collision avoidance. Grouping them that way is not the point: the regulator already does it. What follows is what happened to those notices after they were published, which nothing else keeps.

What these notices told owners about the letter

A recall notice is not the recall. What reaches the driveway is a letter, and the notice is where the manufacturer says when that letter is coming. Of the 46 notices whose record names forward collision avoidance:

That last figure is the one worth sitting with. 9 per cent of the notices in this group leave an owner with no date to hold anyone to. Nothing requires one, and nothing anywhere counts them, which is why we do.

The dates that have passed

Five of the 13 notices that named a date named one that has since gone by. That is not proof the letter never arrived: it is proof the date the notice gave is now in the past, which is the point at which an owner who has heard nothing has a reason to ask.

A notice is counted late here only where it said a letter was expected to be mailed on a stated date and that date has passed. Notices saying letters were already mailed are never counted, and neither are notices that gave no date.

Which of these notices were rewritten after they were published

None. We fingerprinted the defect, consequence and remedy text of every one of these notices the first time we read it and have compared them on every read since. No regulator keeps the earlier version, so a rewrite anywhere else goes unrecorded; the ones we have caught are on the changes page.

How long owners waited to hear about it

Measured from the day the defect report reached the regulator to the owner notification date the register carries. For the 44 notices in this group where both dates exist, the median wait was 41 days, against 39 days across the whole register, 2 days longer than the record as a whole.

The law allows sixty days from the filing of the report. 1 of these notices (2 per cent) sit on the far side of that line, against 18.4 per cent across every campaign we can measure. Sixty days to tell you sets out the rule, the method, and the three reasons a notice past the line is not by itself a breach.

Who filed them

28 filers appear across these notices. The count is of notices, not of vehicles: one notice can name a single van or two million cars, so a long list here is not the same as a large recall.

Filed by Notices in this group
Ford 5
Tesla 4
Mazda 3
Autocar 3
Toyota 2
Mbusa 2
General Motors 2
Mack 1
Subaru 1
Honda 1
Entegra 1
Newmar 1

16 further filers hold the remaining 16. Every filer has its own page under the manufacturer index, and how long each of them takes to warn owners (across all of its notices, not only these) is measured on the notification-lag page.

What the remedy is

Read out of the remedy text of each notice, not assumed from the part. A software remedy on a mechanical part is common and is exactly the kind of thing an owner wants to know before booking a day off work.

Remedy Notices
software 28
other 9
replace 4
inspect-then-replace 2
inspect 2
install 1

How this page is built

The part and the remedy are read out of the authority record for each campaign, one campaign at a time, and stored as they are read. All 15,253 campaigns in the register have been read. The rewrite record and the promised-letter record are ours: no regulator publishes either. How we work sets out the whole method, and anything we have got wrong is listed on the corrections page.

Every part we group this way · Check a car · What to do about a recall

A project by A.I.T. Multiverse Consulting Ltd · cars@aitmultiverse.com