According to AutoInsurance.com, carmakers issued an average of 21 recalls each in 2024.
And while auto manufacturers are on the hook for these repair costs – representing a multi-million-dollar hit to their bottom line – vehicle buyers play a role, too: they must actually bring their vehicles in to have the service performed.
It’s been well documented that many of them don’t, and a recent study by Carfax illustrates just how many that is.
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Carfax contends there are more than 58 million vehicles with an unfixed recall – a figure that represents one in five vehicles on U.S. roads.
Carfax says this number has increased 16% in the past two years. Even more troubling, 14 million of them have two or more open recalls.
The firm says these ongoing, unresolved recalls are “significantly raising the risk of critical safety component failures, potentially involving brake systems, airbags and seatbelts.”
So why does this gap exist? A 2017 study by the University of Michigan blamed recall ambivalence on consumers’ fears of being upsold on other repairs while at the dealership.
Respondents to their survey also said they couldn’t spare their vehicles for the time it took to get the repair and that the wait for the fix was too long.
Carfax says it has been working with the NHTSA as well as vehicle manufacturers to help close these recalls, and the data points to where they might start first: Texas leads U.S. states with the number of registered vehicles with 2 or more open safety recalls.
They have 1.6 million.
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