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Suspension: what the notices said, and what they say now

We hold 730 recall notices whose authority record names a fault in suspension. 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 730 notices whose record names suspension:

That last figure is the one worth sitting with. 8 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

19 of the 201 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

One of these notices has been reworded since it was published. The regulator shows the notice as it stands today and does not keep the earlier version. We do, because we fingerprinted the defect, consequence and remedy text the first time we read it and have compared them on every read since.

Every rewrite we have caught, on any subject, is listed with both versions side by side 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 718 notices in this group where both dates exist, the median wait was 33 days, against 39 days across the whole register, 6 days quicker than the record as a whole.

The law allows sixty days from the filing of the report. 97 of these notices (14 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

248 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 32
Forest River 28
General Motors 20
Porsche 18
Jayco 14
Keystone 14
BMW 13
Chrysler (FCA / Stellantis) 13
Volkswagen 12
Toyota 12
Hyundai 10
Grand Design 10

236 further filers hold the remaining 458. 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
replace 304
inspect-then-replace 189
install 74
other 57
repair 57
inspect 47
software 2

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 15,233 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