Taking a brake: Maruti to ‘inspect’ 52,686 units of new Swift, Baleno

Maruti Suzuki on Tuesday said that it is undertaking a service campaign to inspect 52,686 units of its new Swift and Baleno, both hugely popular cars, for a possible fault in the brake vacuum hose. The units manufactured between December 1, 2017 and March 16, 2018 will be covered under the campaign.

In popular parlance this is kind of a recall but Maruti has not called it such because technically in a recall, free of cost repair of the faulty part is done by the company which otherwise is a security risk. In the current case there’s no security risk, just that the brake gets a bit hard if continuously applied in a short span of time. It does not in any way impact the braking system in terms of its functioning, company officials said. Service campaigns are undertaken globally by automobile companies to rectify faults that may potentially cause inconvenience to customers, the company said. Customers will be contacted by dealers for inspection and replacement of the faulty part, it added. “The inspection and replacement will be done free of cost for the customer”.

A total of 44,982 units of new Swift, which was launched in February this year, and 7,704 units of Baleno are covered under the service campaign. Both the cars are built on the same platform and have a common architecture. They both have high demand and have waiting period running into several weeks.

While there’s no official policy framed by the government on recall, manufacturers follow a voluntary recall policy adopted by their industry body Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam). Under it, if any company detects that its products suffer from any manufacturing defect which can be a safety hazard, they voluntarily contact the customers and rectify the problem free of cost.

In recent years the number of recalls is on the rise. So far in the current calendar there have been a recall of around 1.4 lakh units across manufacturers to rectify some kind of problems. In the previous calendar also the number of recalls stood at around 80,000 units.

Amongst car manufacturers, Honda Cars, Toyota Kirloskar, and Mercedes-Benz India are the few who have recalled vehicles so far this year. Similarly, among the two-wheeler players recalls have been done by Suzuki Motorcycle India, Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, Kawasaki Motors and Triumph Motorcycle.