Actually this whole thing with automobile recalls is, in my own opinion, getting rather rediculious.
I started in the business in the mid 1950's; cars still had ignition points, plain old spark plugs, bias ply tires, manual chokes and mechanical lifters.
Most warantee's were somewhere between 30 days and 3,000 miles to maybe 12,000 miles and one year.
They covered the major components, engine, transmission, and certain suspension parts.
Items like brake parts, clutches, tires, lights, wipers and a whole list of other parts were considered wear items and it was up to the customer to take care of their repair or replacement.
Points and plugs lasted anywhere from 5 to 10,000 miles, valves needed to be adjusted at about the same interval, tires might make 8 to 10,000 miles before they needed replacement, usually valves were refaced and seats reground somewhere around 25,000 miles and rings and bearings were replace when the second valve job was done.
My 1958 Chevrolet was probably the very worst example of the automotive art that was ever foisted off on the buying public. It was impossible to keep ball joints in the car, they might last for a complete year, but usually I had to replace them more often than that. Of course here in New England we have more than our share of frost heaves, potholes and at that time in my area there were still many miles of unpaved roads.
As I was working in a garage at the time, this car was washed several times a week and in less than two years the front seat fell through the floor, the front fenders were rusted out over the headlites, there were holes in the trunk and in the rear wheel wells also.
If you wanted to make any sort of a corner with it, you needed to be slowing down and with the old drum brakes, that required an appointment at least a day or two in advance if your speed was much over a fast walk.
Now folks actually think those cars were great and spend tons of money to restore them. They were really pretty sorry excuses and just one more reason the imports suceeded so well here.
Then, because Chrysler Corp. wasn't selling all that well, they were worse in all respects than the GM products of the day, they decided to offer a 7 year, 70,000 mile warantee.
That did help their sales a very small amount and nearly bankrupt the company.
For years Chrysler's largest customer was their own leasing company and they had cars sitting on storage lots all around the country.
But the idea of extended warantee's caught on with the consumer, other manufacter's jumped on the wagon in the hopes of selling more of the rather poor quality product to the masses of consumers. That worked, to a degree at least, until both European and Japanese imports showed the American consumer that cars didn't have to cost quite so much to give much better quality construction, reasonable economy and less polution.
The problem came about with those extended warantee programs, warantee cost per vehicle was driving the profits down and shoddy workmanship sending customers to the import dealer's showrooms.
While all this was happening, someone had to pay the price, so the consumer picked up the tab in the higher vehicle sticker price.
Nothing comes for free.
Then a gentleman by the name of Ralph Nadar wrote a book about the lack of concern for consumer safety in the automobile industry and suddenly we started to have massive safety recalls.
By the way, Ralph Nadar has absolutely no automotive engineering knowledge and doesn't even to this day, hold a driver's license, but he is considered an expert in the field of automotive safety? Yeah, sure he is!
The race was on and the end is still nowhere in sight. Now the consumer wants, indeed demands, the manufacturer to be completely responsible and liable for their automobile from the day it leaves the factory until it ends up completely worn out in a salvage yard. Of course in the ideal world, that would never happen as the manufacturer would build a product that would last a lifetime and never need to be replaced.
So our plain-jane, no frills car now costs us on average somewhere around $25,000, the warantees still vary greatly, both in time, mileage and items covered, but to appease the consumer and the consumer advocates, the manufacters are forced to recall vehicles that in most cases would (and should) be considered close to being sent to their final reward at the great junkyard (oopps, that's salvage yard, nowadays, isn't it?) in the sky. Actually, they get torn apart and nearly all of the material in today's vehicles is recycled into the next generation of cars to be passed on once again to another consumer.
But at least most of today's cars will last a lot longer, both in terms of mileage and time, they are safer, more comfortable, stop and handle so much better that there is no comparison, offer features which were available in only the highest priced vehicles of only a few years ago and the manufacturers are willing to recall them without the government forcing them to do so, as evidenced by the recent actions of both Damilar/Chrysler and Ford Motor Company.
Both of these were voluntary recalls by the respective manufacturers when they were made aware of problems with their products.
In the last twenty years, I've owned a rather varied assortment of makes and models, both American and Imported, and every one of those cars has gone well over 100,000 miles, has been relatively economical to operate and only an idiot would wish to have something like that 1958 Chevrolet to depend on every day.
The newer cars start when it's -25 degrees, they get much better gas mileage, I haven't had to replace any rusted out body or floor panels, the disc brakes usually last somewhere around 65 to 75,000 miles, the only engine repairs have been a set of bearings and an oil pump for an old Ford pickup at over 265,000 miles, and I did have to replace a clutch in my little Plymouth Reliant station wagon at 215,000 miles. Oh yeah, had to do the front wheel bearings and one axle on one of the Ford Taurus wagons we had too. That was around 150,000 miles.
Sorry to make this so long, but I just wanted to make the point that today's cars, no matter who builds them, are so far ahead of what was offered only a few years ago that this whole issue of the recalls is, as I pointed out in a previous post, in reality a non-issue. It is something the media has jumped on in order to sell itself to the uninformed general public.
I think it is well past the time when we demand that the media report the news as news and stop trying to make news stories where there are none in a feeble attempt to sell themselves to the general public in order to please their sponsors.
But then again, who the devil am I to think that way?
