Recalls by car makers in India seem to be popping up every week now with the latest being German luxury car maker Audi issuing a recall for its A4 sedan. The company’s Indian arm has issued a voluntary recall of 6,758 units of the A4 manufactured between November 2011 and October 2014 to rectify a fault in airbag deployment. This is exercise is part of a worldwide recall of 8.5 lakh units of the Audi A4 sedan affected by an airbag issue.
According to the company’s website the owners of the affected vehicles will be contacted soon by the dealers upon which they would e required to bring their vehicle to the dealership where the necessary work will be carried out. The rectification of this problem involves a minor software update to the airbag deployment control unit and no component replacement/addition is required. The entire process will take about 30 minutes after which the vehicles will be handed over to their respective owners.
This Audi A4 recall has been triggered by a routine testing and ongoing field operations which revealed that if these models were involved in a side-impact crash, the side airbags would deploy properly, but if the vehicle continued to move and was involved in a secondary front-end impact, the front airbags might not work.
This Audi’s second recall exercise this year with the first one being carried out to replace a faulty vacuum line in the brake system of 382 units of the Q7 SUV manufactured between March 2012 and December 2012. As is the case with the Audi A4 recall, this exercise will take approximately five hours and will be carried out free of cost at Audi dealerships. The affected owners have already been contacted and the necessary work is being carried out by Audi dealerships.
As far as Indian automakers are concerned a total of around 7 lakh vehicles have been recalled by companies such as Nissan, Honda, Maruti Suzuki, Toyota, Ford, GM and Mahindra & Mahindra ever since the voluntary vehicle recall for safety related issues guidelines were set by SIAM in July 2012. The most recent ones being those by Nissan and Honda for an airbag issue plaguing the unit supplied by Japanese airbag manufacturer Takata.
