Vauxhall has announced that owners of Vauxhall Zafira B models will be invited to bring their vehicles back to Vauxhall dealerships “so that a preventative action can be carried out to protect the vehicles from the risk of fire”. It is a second recall for the model and builds on an earlier recall that Vauxhall said was necessary due to some cases of faulty repair work carried out in UK.
In December last year the GM’s UK brand wrote to all 234,938 Vauxhall Zafira B owners to make them aware of an issue which could affect their vehicle.
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It said its investigations had found evidence of “improper repair of the blower motor resistor and its thermal fuse, which is designed to protect the blower motor system”.
These improper repairs, which may have been conducted without the owners’ knowledge, can lead to overheating of the system’s electrical components and the potential for a fire, Vauxhall said. Resistors should never be repaired, they should only be replaced.
Since then it has been conducting a recall programme designed to return vehicles to their original condition. This has involved replacing the resistor in every vehicle inspected and the blower motor and the pollen filter in many thousands of vehicles.
Earlier this month, Vauxhall and the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) agreed that additional action is necessary “to go further and improve the overall robustness of the system”.
Vauxhall will undertake a second recall to “replace the current soldered fuse resistor with a wax fuse resistor so reducing the opportunity for manipulation”. When the recalls are complete, all vehicles will have a new wax fuse resistor, a new blower motor and a new moulding at the base of the windscreen to address water ingress.
