“They’re putting a Band-Aid on this thing,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety. “It looks like it’s a cheap fix instead of repairing the entire antilock brake system.”
By Tom Krisher
April 1, 2024
In September, Hyundai and Kia issued a recall of 3.4 million of its vehicles in the United States with an ominous warning: The vehicles should be parked outdoors and away from buildings because they risked catching fire, whether the engines were on or off.
Six months later, most of those autos remain on the road — unrepaired — putting their owners, their families and potentially other people in danger of fires that could spread to garages, houses or other vehicles.
Hyundai and Kia have acknowledged that there’s little hope of repairing most of the affected vehicles until June or later, roughly nine months after they announced the recalls. (Hyundai owns part of Kia, though the two companies operate independently.)
The two companies attributed the delays, in part, to the huge number of vehicles involved, among the largest recalls they’ve ever done. The fires, they say, have occurred when brake fluid leaked onto the circuit boards of antilock braking systems, triggering an electrical short and igniting the fluid.
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