Toyota Motor Corp. this week announced it will offer free repairs to owners of more than 200,000 vehicles with potentially leaky oil hoses.
The action was labeled by some news outlets as a “recall,” in the vein of the auto maker’s recent recalls of some six million vehicles for sudden acceleration and other issues. But the latest action wasn’t a recall. It was, in Toyota’s phrase, a “limited service campaign.”
Safety officials and experts use words in ways that aren’t necessarily easy for outsiders to translate. Ordinary consumers who want to explore the huge databases of information that safety regulators maintain will find portals online. But it takes persistence and some trial and error to assemble a complete answer to simple questions such as: Am I the only one who’s experienced this problem? Is there a safety recall on my car?
Chrysler said in a statement that its analysis shows its safety recalls “are the lowest in the industry for the last two calendar years” when adjusted for sales volume. Toyota has said it believes it has developed “robust and durable” solutions for the complaints that led to its sudden acceleration recalls.
Some members of Congress want NHTSA to do more to make the huge quantities of information it has on safety complaints more user-friendly and accessible. One proposal pushed by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) and others: Allow consumers to get a full readout of recalls and other safety issues by plugging in the vehicle identification number of their cars.
