Why Indian Automobile Companies shy away from Recalls

In India Government & consumer courts are not so strong as foreign countries. India is first place in Number of death due to road accidents.RTO is responsible to investigate about the accident. But they are not recording the investigation data, & escalate to government if same cause repeating for accidents for specific Brand of vehicles. I experienced this personally, Since I lost my younger brother in Road accident 4months ago. They not even spend more than 2 minutes to Inspect the Vehicle. In India No value for human life.There is no strong agency to prove the failure of OE parts in India and take the issue till get the right answer from vehicle manufactures like foreign countries.Find below the case study about recall of cars in USA for your reference.You came to know How strong the government & consumers are.

Toyota's response to the potentially lethal accelerator fault which has caused cars to career out of control came under renewed attack tonight following an investigation which cast fresh doubt on the way this week's crisis was handled.

The Guardian has established that:

• Government officials said Toyota did not tell them about the problem until prompted.

• Toyota decided the fault was not a safety issue when it received the first reports over a year ago.

• A senior executive in charge of product quality drove a Toyota with a faulty accelerator to a meeting with government safety officials after the company had announced a recall.

The revelations came as the company's president, Akio Toyoda, finally apologised to customers for a recall that could affect 8.1m vehicles worldwide. He confirmed the company is investigating a further problem with the brakes on Prius cars in Japan and North America which could lead to a recall of another 270,000 cars.

"We are facing a crisis," he said in a statement in Tokyo. "I offer my apologies for the worries. Many customers are wondering whether their cars are OK."

In Britain, where more than 180,000 vehicles have been recalled, it emerged the government demanded information from Toyota at the beginning of January after government safety officials were alerted to the scale of the risk by their US counterparts. Toyota knew about the problem from the winter of 2008/09, but only provided detailed information to the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa), which registers recalls on faulty cars, on 22 January this year, according to the government.

Toyota executives have also admitted that they treated 26 cases across Europe in the winter of 2008/09 as "a quality issue". Only when the problem recurred this winter did they treat it as a safety issue. In the meantime drivers of models left on the road reported their cars speeding dangerously out of control. One driver reported that his Avensis accelerator became stuck last August while overtaking at 65mph.

But in perhaps the most astonishing twist, Neal Standen, Toyota's general manager of product quality, admitted he drove his company Avensis with a stiff accelerator to a meeting on Monday with government officials to formally register the recall, despite Toyota's own advice that customers experiencing any accelerator pedal problems should "drive to the nearest safe location, shut off the engine and contact a Toyota centre for assistance". He said he had driven the car with the stiff pedal fault for six months and had not yet taken it for repair. He said: "I choose to drive that car every day."

A spokeswoman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said: "Somebody in his position should have known better. He should have stopped driving the car and had it checked immediately. If this is a company car we would hope the employer would provide a replacement."

Toyota denied it has put customers' lives at risk and insisted it had responded as quickly as possible to the problem.

"There were so few cases and no accidents [last winter], we didn't think it was a safety issue," a spokeswoman said. "We now have a larger number of cases and we are now treating it as a safety issue. That is how we value our customers."

The company also defended its decision not to inform the authorities about the problem last winter.

"During this winter period, we started to see the cases increase," said Steve Settle, Toyota's director of after-sales. "We lodged 20 reports from November to January and compared to the previous year that was a significant difference."

The RAC, which represents motorists in the UK, said the revelations about Toyota's handling of the situation were "worrying" and called for a review of how car safety recalls are handled.

"Motorists would hope that governments are not forced to request information about these problems," said its spokesman, Adrian Tink. "From a motorists' perspective, these are worrying concerns."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Transport said: "We expect them to come and tell Vosa about problems when they see a pattern emerging about an issue with design and construction. They need to see it as a pattern. At that point we expect them to tell us about it."

The US government has also had to push Toyota to act on the problem. "While Toyota is taking responsible action now, it unfortunately took an enormous effort to get to this point," Ray LaHood, the US trasportation secretary said this week. "We have been pushing Toyota to take measures to protect consumers."