What Volkswagen did was shameful, but was it the first automobile company to have cheated by not following norms stipulated by the regulator? The answer is a resounding no and unsurprisingly, the biggest scandals in automotive history have usually dealt with safety. Earlier this month, General Motors agreed to a settlement with the US Justice Department requiring it to pay a $900-million fine and serve three years' probation for concealing an ignition switch defect now linked to more than 100 deaths. There's more: a few months earlier, Fiat Chrysler paid a record $105-million fine for failing to live up to safety regulations on dozens of recalls. Last year, Toyota paid a $1.2-billion fine to settle another Justice Department criminal investigation. And there have been numerous instances of recalls, allegations of cover-ups and criminal negligence by some of the world's biggest names, making it obvious that the world's top names in the automobile industry have not really covered themselves in glory when it comes to customer safety. It is an irony that CEOs of these global companies have been lecturing their peers in emerging economies about how they ought to treat customers fairly.
That of course should not hide the below-par performance of Indian automakers on this front. For example, the first-ever independent crash tests of some of India's popular small cars last year showed a high risk of life-threatening injuries in road crashes. All the cars selected by the UK-based non-profit organisation, Global NCAP, for testing in a frontal impact at 64 kilometres per hour received zero-star adult protection ratings. For the record, the five cars tested accounted for a fifth of all new cars sold in India. The test results prompted the chairman of Global NCAP to say that it was worrying to see levels of safety that were 20 years behind those in Europe. Also, according to a report put out by Autocar Professional, the number of vehicles recalled by auto makers in India has crossed one million in the last three years. The figure doesn't include the biggest vehicle recall in India last week - that of Honda announcing that it will voluntarily replace airbag inflators of 223,578 vehicles of previous generations of some of its models. The standard response from auto companies in India has been that the cars produced for the Indian market meet the country's safety standards. This approach must change. Automobile companies must recognise that it is in their interest that they take credible and quick steps to address growing concerns about safety of cars. Simultaneously, the government too should take steps, including the imposition of penalties, to ensure that car manufacturers adhere to basic safety standards.