You contradict yourself. I agree autonation is not deliberately putting people in unsafe cars but the end result is the same and it is driven by profit motive
As avid followers of car industry, most of LH probably know the answers off the top of their head.
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The average went up substantially due to absolutely massive takata airbag recall (affects tens of millions of cars of all brands from Toyota to BMW) and GM ignition switch defect
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Both of these recalls resulted in several deaths and are subject of class action lawsuits with Takata having gone bankrupt and GM having set up a massive victim compensation fund.
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Several deaths and massive injuries (not very pleasant when the airbag blows in your face while you are driving) including overseas attributed to Takata and several to GM
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Last year I bought a car with takata recall from Penske dealership. It was openly documented on the carfax…Recalls are now part of carfax checks, even if dealership does not disclose.
This article in the Washington Post :
says that this problem “violates federal safety standards”:
" the camera and display settings can be adjusted so the display isn’t visible, and the system will keep that setting the next time the vehicles are shifted into reverse"
Hence the recall.
Not all “safety recalls” cause entire orphanages or puppy rescues to spontaneously combust.
In fact, I would wager that almost none of them have statistically meaningful risks to the “victims” who bought the impacted vehicles.
I’m not arguing for AutoNation (I haven’t had great experiences with their dealers), or against preventive safety measures, but rather for some logic and perspective about the actual risk and impact.
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Yes I agree since carfax lists the recall, so the buyers can do their own diligence. And yes, I did forget the camera, sensor and infotainment recalls …
Where did I contradict myself? They are a lot of things IE they have many issues. One of them is not deliberately putting people danger.
I don’t understand your point. You agree they aren’t doing it deliberately yet you attribute the incompetence to profit motive? In fact it’s the opposite, they are loosing a bunch of money they could be making on easy warranty repairs.
Is AutoNation even authorized to do warranty repairs?
It’s worse than they [AN] are doing it because of incompetence - they are doing it out of convenience. The used car sales manager just wants to hit his numbers, he has no vested interest in making repairs …
I don’t understand the question. Of course they are they own hundreds of dealerships.
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yes they can send it to their affiliated dealership for the recall fix. This is what Penske did with my car - sent it to a Penske dealership to fix. But only after I signed the contract - they had no interest in fixing it while it was sitting on their lot for sale…
The guys told me they want to keep their outlay as small as possible - and only fix it when they have a buyer, particularly for cars they are selling close to wholesale … and are borderline thinking of sending to auction if it does not move in a week or so
I didn’t know, thought they specialize in used only, like Carmax.
I am pretty sure AN would be more motivated to do a pre-sales recall fix for 50k 7 series than for a 10k Civic. As usual, money talks …
Perhaps but that isn’t how AN works at the store level. Each store is responsible for their own P&L and the GM cares about the overall bottom line not just that the used car manager hits his numbers. If the store isn’t profitable they sell it. They are divesting and purchasing dealerships every month.
Therefore back to my original point, if they, with the “they” being AN leadership where aware this was going on they would make sure they took advantage of the easy high profit margin opportunity sitting there and perform all this warranty work.
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Nope they own over 300 new car dealerships from 30 different brands.
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The Takata airbag recall is probably one of the most serious.
Using the death and injury stats from the Vox article and the number of impacted vehicles from the NHTSA, the risk of death of buying any impacted vehicle, ever, new or used, from any dealer anywhere at any time:
24 / 41,600,000 = 0.000058%
200 injuries puts your risk of injury at
200 / 41,600,000 = 0.0000024%
You would then need to reduce these stats to isolate those deaths/injuries encountered in used vehicles sold by AutoNation with this issue unaddressed.
From there you would have to reduce that number by the chances of a death/injury during your ownership window.
The odds of anything serious happening are effectively zero, which is why Vox didn’t bother attributing any actual deaths or injuries to AutoNation.
Moreover, the takata defect issue is not distributed equally. It is more likely to happen in hot humid climates as the recall has to do with the explosive charge and ignitor getting degraded by humidity. So people in Northern states have an even smaller risk … Just thought you would want to add this to your actuarial studies & modeling about risk vs reward…
The cost of designing and manufacturing a risk-free vehicle and ensuring a risk-free distribution system and a risk-free secondary/tertiary/whatever comes after that market would make it impossible for anyone to afford a car.
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Vox will write an article about Carvana next, and they’ll use this same line:
While information about recalls can be found on AutoNation’s website, a PIRG spokesman said the company isn’t doing enough to notify customers about the potential risks of purchasing a vehicle.
The article doesn’t say how the study determined if a vehicle has open recalls.
We got an Autocheck report from Carmax when they appraised the Prius we recently sold, and Autocheck showed an open recall.
We took the car to a Toyota dealer to have the recall addressed before advertising it for private sale, and there were none.