Nick Graves

I think Porsche might disagree with you there, Ben!

fluffyninja

What's the cause of that one? Looks like a fuel line breach or similar. Not what I would refer to as an engine failure.
Pretty much anything fuel line related is classed as safety

mikey k

Presuming that's a 991 GT3 (can't tell from the smoke)
It starts as a conrod failure punching a hole in the casing ejecting hot oil on to the exhaust

ianl

OK, I have no legal training so you need to bear with me here.

You say that the reason Toyota are quick to recall cars is purely corporate arse covering and anything else would be corporate suicide?

But from where I am sitting, there is a difference in the way difference motor manufacturers handle recalls.

I made the mistake of buying a Renault a few years ago. The damed thing kept dropping into 'limp' mode...quite exciting when it chose to do this on a busy M25 whilst I was in the fast lane doing 80-odd miles an hour. It certainly felt unsafe to me (and I daresay to the poor souls who took some quite imaginative evasive action to avoid my rapidly slowing car).

I naturally raised merry hell with my Renault dealer who initially did no more than reset the error code having decided it was 'just one of those things'. I explained I was reluctant to accept this (those were not my precise words) so they referred the problem to tech. support. They eventually came back to the service manager with the news that this was a known bug in the engine management software, and an update was available. I asked if this was a recall issue and they said, nope, it was something they would do as and when they saw the cars at official Renault service centres. Given tat some of the cars carrying this problem were more than 3 years old, it is highly likely some of them are still out their having not had the bug-fix.

I like to think that the more responsible manufacturers - and I consider Honda and Toyota to fall into this category - would have recalled cars for an issue such as this. Indeed I know some of the Toyota recalls have been in relation to engine management software bugs.

cheshire_carper

It's nice to think the firms have a heart. Maybe they do. The established ones exist to make money or appease shareholders. It's not really about love of customers. Most of what you see happen is as a result of either reprisal, fear of or regulation. The love of the client is driven by the love of the pound. I don't think I needed to type any of this as we all know the score.

fluffyninja

OK, again this is where the line begins to blur with regards to safety.
A con-rod through the block is not inherrently unsafe so you wouldn't class that as a safety related recall if you had a spate of them
However you have a cluster where something like that fire happens and that is where the negotiation with VOSA starts and you decide on a recall or not

ref comments about big businesses caring................
I would like to think that I have a heart and most of the people I work with do as well. Not an area of my job any more but this sort of thing used to be the main area. I'd be supporting the customer relations guys with technical advice and investigations. We had the discretion to pay out on issues well out of the warranty period if it was justified. 100% dealer told JFDI and bill us. It is the morally correct thing to do.

That said you have to balance that with the pi$$ takers.
Car well out of warranty, never serviced by a main dealer, trying to claim money when nobody from the company has even been given the chance to see the fault.....sling your hook.

You do see varying shades of grey between the two but I always thought we trod a reasonable line of that

ianl

This is the sort of thing I am talking about. Of course at the end of the day they are all in it to make money, but there are different ways of going about this.

I have been loyal to the Honda brand for many years. This loyalty has been encouraged by the way Honda have treated me as a customer - in exactly the way fluffyninja describes above at Toyota, Honda have on 3 occasions (1 S2000, 2 NSX) have fixed out of warranty (and jolly expensive!) issues with my cars foc.

Nottm_S2

I have a neutral experience of both Honda and BMW

I would err away from a Toyota based on the number of headlines they make on stuff like this I think. I don't view them as 'as reliable as Honda'

And the 2009 s2000 issues show honda to be within contempt IMO

Nick Graves

A lot of that is very unfair on Toyota; the 'unintended acceleration' thing seems as unfounded as it did with Audi in the 1980s. Not all of the recalls were recalls per se.

Also, engineers like Ben do I believe have a conscience. But it can seem a bit screwed when beancounters like me decide that eliminating the Corvair's camber compensator, or that it's more cost-effective probability-wise to pay damages for the deaths due to explodey fuel tanks on Pintos and Explorers than it is to re-design the fuel tank, that corporate values appear fucked-up. But that decision would be taken at a far higher level.

Furthermore, there are issues that cause recalls and there are those that leave one stranded like continuous coil pack & transmission solenoid failures, which the manufacturers are in denial over. I've only ever owned the top half of a Toyota, but there doesn't seem to be anything intrinsically wrong with the engineering.

PS - has Ben been a bit busy calibrating the new small engines with the Atkinson cycle/high swirl porting, or was that all Made in Japan? (DP reference there...)

fluffyninja

Nah, not me that one. We're 1.6 & 1.8L based in the uk