Hyundai Motor and affiliate Kia Motors will take “global action” to repair a potentially faulty brake light switch, after saying first they planned to recall almost 1.9m cars in the United States.
The move may mean the automaker ends up recalling even more vehicles than that number, Hyundai’s US record, and is a stark warning that it may have sacrificed quality standards for rapid expansion, the Reuters news agency suggested.
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Chairman Chung Mong-koo has consistently stressed quality should come first and has recently slowed the pace of capacity expansion in favour of stricter quality control but analysts said the shift in direction has come too late.
“Hyundai has built factories very fast around the globe until recent years but its quality improvement has failed to keep up with its rapid volume growth,” Kim Phill-soo, a professor at the department of automotive engineering at Daelim University College in Seoul, told Reuters.
“The latest recall highlighted loopholes in Hyundai’s quality system.”
A Hyundai executive told the news agency alarm bells starting ringing in the company after it slid down industry rankings for quality in recent years.
“We have fixed problems, and quality rankings will improve from this year,” the anonymous executive told Reuters without elaborating further.
The report noted Hyundai in 2012 fell to 18th in a key quality survey by JD Power and Associates, from 11th in 2011.
“Part of the reason (for the fall) is that Hyundai has been expanding rapidly into new segments and some of the newer vehicles have not performed quite so well as the original vehicles such as Sonata,” JD Power’s Dave Sargent told Reuters before the recall announcement.
Hyundai will conduct a recall, service campaign or other corrective measures in all countries where vehicles equipped with the stop lamp switch in question have been sold, the company said on Thursday.
Last November, Hyundai admitted it had overstated fuel economies of some cars in North America, a move that damaged its reputation and could cost up to KRW440bn (US$394m) in potential compensation, the report noted.
