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In the current Health and Safety obsession by the EU and lawmakers in all civilised countries I find this next piece very hard to believe can still happen, especially in the UK. If you are a recent reader of my musings you may not have read the piece I put out regarding the sort of health and safety attitude that existed in the US in the 1970’s.

Briefly, Ford had a car called the Pinto which happened to be the biggest selling ‘sub compact’ car in the US at the time. Unfortunately the design of the car was unsafe, they had placed the fuel tank in such a position that if the car was hit from behind the tank exploded.

More than 500 people died as a result of the Pinto bursting into flames when they were either driving or were a passenger in the car. Many more received severe burn injuries. When a burn victim sued Ford for the faulty design it was uncovered that Ford engineers had known about the problem for many years. But Ford management had carried out a cost – benefit analysis and concluded that it wasn’t worth the $11 per car to fix the problem by recalling all of the cars compared to the cost of recompense payable to the victims.

They believed that if the problem remained unfixed they would face claims from 180 burn victims and the families of 180 victims killed. They placed a monetary value of $67,000 on a burn victim and $200,000 on a death. They added to these costs the cost of replacing the cars. They concluded that if they fixed the problem it would save them $49.5 million in compensation and car replacement costs but the cost of repairing the 12.5 million cars affected would set them back $137.5 million.

So they concluded that the cost of paying out for losses and injuries was a better option than paying out for the cars to be repaired. This of course raised a number of issues that the US Government jumped on and Ford ended up with huge costs and penalties to pay. One would assume that this couldn’t possibly happen again in this day and age with a higher moral obligation placed on companies along with massive legal consequences.

But then I read about the recent problems experienced by Vauxhall Zafira owners. I had seen several YouTube videos of Zafiras catching light and cars being pretty much instantly destroyed. For ages Vauxhall denied the existence of a problem but after 300 Zafiras caught fire they were forced to take a more responsible approach. The problem was found to be in the car’s heating and ventilation system which led to a recall of all Zafiras, known as ‘B’ models on sale between 2005 and 2014.

They originally claimed that the problem had only come to light in 2014, following which they instigated a full recall in December 2015. However, when questioned by MP’s a couple of weeks ago, Peter Hope, customer experience director at Vauxhall, admitted that they had known about the problem as long ago as 2009 when the first fire was reported. Their excuse was that when cars are completely destroyed by fire there is very little evidence left to analyse in order to establish the cause of the fire.

The good news is that unlike the Ford Pinto no-one was even injured but that isn’t the point. At what stage does a car manufacturer take responsibility and carry out a very detailed investigation when consistent things go wrong with one of their car models? The estimated cost of repairs is £33.6 million – tough! Only now, in the month of August 2016 is a further 235,000 Zafiras, as agreed with the DVLA, being recalled to have the fault fixed.

Shame on you Vauxhall for putting customers through all this when it could have been avoided. When Vauxhall denied responsibility drivers no doubt made insurance claims for their losses, paying an excess and losing no claims bonus. This simply isn’t good enough and after making the cars safe again they should prepare a plan to pay those affected compensation, something, according to Peter Hope is not at the moment being considered. What a disgrace! By Graham Hill