Columns
A recall can be a good thing
January 31, 2010
“Recall” is the catchword around the car industry these days, what with both Toyota and Honda announcing major ones lately. A product recall is the process in which consumers are asked to return a specific purchased item thought to be either faulty or unsafe, to its manufacturer so that it can be replaced or repaired. Recalls are most common and most sensational in the United States, where consumer protection is a top priority of the federal government. Over there, a failure on the part of a manufacturer to compensate a customer who has lodged a formal complaint about its product, can be very costly--not just in terms of legal expenses and eventual indemnification, but more so in terms of public perception.
Recalling a product or a car can be somewhat of an alien concept to us Filipinos because we don’t really practice it here. I’m not even aware of any Philippine law that pertains to it. Case in point: The right palm rest of my MacBook chipped late last year. I went to an Apple-accredited store here and inquired about a replacement of the cracked panel. The store clerk who attended to me quoted a price of P6,300 for the repair, pointing out that the palm rest is part of a one-piece assembly that also includes the keyboard and the touchpad. Finding the price a bit too expensive, I simply convinced myself I could live with a chipped laptop.
When I went to the US in December for a vacation, I chanced upon an Apple store in a mall. I made a service appointment and returned the following day with my MacBook. I was actually prepared to pay as much as $100 to have the keyboard assembly replaced. To my pleasant surprise, the Apple genius--the technical service department of Apple stores in the US is literally called Genius Bar--said he could fit a new keyboard panel on my laptop in 15 minutes, and that it wouldn’t cost me a penny. Apparently, there had been a recall issued by Apple involving the easily chipped palm rest of the MacBook.
As a customer, I felt really good. I must admit that I had been disappointed with Apple the first time I’d seen the crack on my MacBook, but all of that disappointment completely disappeared when I got to avail of the free replacement part. If anything, I now have a higher regard for the Apple brand, and will most likely continue patronizing its products in the future.
I’m sharing this story because I want to make an argument that recalls are not necessarily a bad thing for the reputation of a product manufacturer. Last week, after Toyota issued a recall of 2.3 million vehicles in the US for a potentially defective gas pedal, critics were quick to declare that this could spell the end of the Japanese carmaker’s sales dominance in America and possibly even the world. They argue that since Toyota has been largely successful on account of its bulletproof reliability, the foundation for that success could crumble with this widespread recall.
Well, I don’t know about that. In the first place, the issue is not really that serious. It involves the gas pedal having a tendency to either get stuck or be slow in springing back after you step on it, resulting in unwanted acceleration. It sounds extremely dangerous but it seems it really isn’t. I am basing that statement on the fact that there have only been a handful of formal reports and there has been no casualty in any of those reports. Someone has even pointed out that a number of complaints only poured in after the announcement of the recall, implying that said complaints were probably filed by opportunistic car owners. Toyota launched a voluntary recall to be on the safe side; it doesn’t mean all 2.3 million vehicles being recalled are defective.
(UPDATE: Pardon the inaccuracy of the preceding paragraph. When I said "there has been no casualty in any of those reports," I did so thinking the recent recall of 2.3 million cars concerning a gas-pedal problem was an entirely separate issue from the earlier floor-mat problem. Apparently, several people died in the US last year due to unintended acceleration on their Toyota or Lexus vehicles, and Toyota claimed it was due to the floor mat jamming the gas pedal. When I wrote this column, I was actually referring to the fresher 2.3-million-unit recall, which Toyota said was not related in any way to the floor-mat issue. Which led me to make the statement that there had been no casualty yet with the newer pedal-problem recall. But now, thanks to more information brought up by readers of this column, it seems to me the floor-mat problem and this latest "pedal-only" issue might actually be totally related. There's suspicion that the Japanese carmaker is merely using the floor mat as a cover-up, and that the real problem lies in the cars' drive-by-wire system. If there's any truth to this, Toyota--at least in the US--is definitely in a huge crisis. But in the spirit of fairness, let's not be quick to condemn anyone. Toyota, after all, wouldn't have consistently topped quality and reliability surveys for years if it had been sloppy with its quality control.)
Of the eight models affected by the recall, only three--the Corolla, the Camry and the RAV4--are being sold in the Philippines. And Toyota Motor Philippines has already issued a statement saying the units sold here aren’t affected by the abovementioned gas-pedal problem. So I wasn’t really bothered by the recall, especially knowing that Americans are generally spoiled consumers who make an issue out of everything.
And then I ultimately realized that the reason I wasn’t too concerned was because I am not a Toyota customer. Yesterday, when Honda announced the recall of 646,000 first-generation Fit/Jazz units, I sat up and paid attention. Because that’s the very car I own and drive. The problem? The window power switch on the driver-side door has a tendency to trap copious amounts of liquid (either from strong rains or melted snow) and then cause the car to overheat. There have been cases of vehicles catching fire. I stopped worrying upon remembering I hate driving in the rain and it doesn’t snow here.
Seriously, these recalls can only result in positive things. Every time a safety issue crops up, a carmaker’s engineering department learns another way to make its cars better and safer. And if it’s true that this recent rush of recalls is the result of Japanese carmakers aiming for global sales leadership at the expense of build quality, then they’ll know better than cut costs and get lousy suppliers next time.
Will this affect Toyota and Honda sales worldwide? Maybe, although I think it shouldn’t. No car is perfect. I have yet to encounter a single car model that has not received its fair share of gripes from owners. We should just consider ourselves lucky that we live in an era when automobiles have already been refined to the point where mechanical problems that frequently plagued cars two decades ago no longer exist.
Every year, the entire automotive industry posts gains in quality improvement. Global marketing research firm J.D. Power and Associates, for instance, reports that the average number of problems per 100 vehicles in the US went down by 36 last year compared to the previous year. There were 206 problems per 100 vehicles in 2008; that number was down to 170 in 2009. Needless to say, car companies in general have not been remiss in making sure that the car you buy today is significantly better than the car they sold as recently as last year.
Some people see a recall as proof of a carmaker’s incompetence in assembling its vehicles. I see it as proof of a carmaker’s readiness to continue its quest to someday build a faultless car.
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