British sports car maker, Aston Martin, has recalled more than 75 per cent of its post-2007 production after discovering they were fitted with counterfeit accelerator pedals.
The low-volume brand is recalling 17,590 cars worldwide after finding a Chinese sub-supplier had pulled a swifty on its plastic accelerator pedals. Aston Martin claims the sub-supplier had used a cheaper material than the one it had specified and that its testing had shown the non-authorized part could break, locking throttles wide open or fully closed.
The recall – enormous by the standards of Aston’s volumes – involves almost every left-hand drive model built since November 2007 and almost every right hand-drive model built since May 2012, when it switched suppliers to the same Chinese company.
The only unaffected model is the flagship Vanquish, but all Vantage, DB9 and Rapide models, plus a host of limited-edition specials, are involved.
Aston Martin filed recall paperwork with the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration this week insisting that the supplier charged with moulding its accelerator pedal arms, Shenzhen Kexiang Mould Co. Ltd., had been using a counterfeit plastic from the Dongguan-based Synthetic Plastic Raw Material Co. Ltd.
Aston Martin, owned by an uneasy partnership of Kuwaiti and Italian investors, insisted there had been no reports of crashes caused by the counterfeit material, but that it found the issue while investigating its earlier recalls from May and October last year.
The issue couldn’t come at a worse time for Aston Martin, which has been trying to convince Mercedes-Benz’s parent company, Daimler, of its financial and engineering credibility in the hopes of cementing closer ties.
Aston Martin's Italian investors had been entertaining hopes of convincing Daimler to buy the marque outright, and had dangled the bait of five per cent non-voting ownership in exchange for AMG V8 engines and electronic architecture, which Daimler gleefully accepted.
Daimler is, however, shy of taking over the company, though it could be forced into ownership if Aston took a Mercedes-Benz SUV architecture for its hoped-for fast SUV. It is widely known that Aston is for sale to the right buyer, and Daimler is unlikely to let any of its hardware fall into the hands of a potential rival.
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