Quote:
Originally Posted by Ultramaroon
No, zero, and as I've said here a few times, this recall was driven entirely by fear of litigation even in the face of the science - both theoretical and experimental - which clearly showed that the defective units, as expected, all failed within a couple thousand miles. Most failed right away. The crisis was over long before the recall had been issued.
My car is a recall candidate.
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I think it is more a case that the Twins got caught up in an event that had little impact on them but was a bigger picture situation. There were something like 400,000 Impreza's and Crosstreks that were the bulk of the recall. The FB20 engines did indeed have many failures that occurred as much as 30,000 miles into ownership so when looking at that total number of possible issues the recall was fully warranted for them. If I recall there was several hundred reported.
on the recall site. On the other hand, the reported spring failure numbers for the FA20 was something like three.
The biggest issue came with the methods required to change the springs in each engine. The FB engine used a very noninvasive method that did not require pulling and resealing half the engine. The FA method, although completely reasonable for anybody that actually followed instructions, was totally different resulting in so many post recall failures.
The volume of other models most certainly had to play a part in the decision to recall. The officially stated reason was that "The vehicle could stall in traffic and present a hazard". This most certainly would be an issue if you had 400,000+ cars that could do it. Meanwhile both Subaru and Toyota totally ignored the 15,000 or so vehicles with bad TOBs that could stall in traffic and present a hazard for 6 model years! The numbers were just not high enough for them to feel a recall was warranted.