Once again, Vauxhall is fielding questions from concerned car owners as to why another of its models has started catching fire. Several Corsa D owners have now reported that their cars have burst into flames without warning, forcing the car maker to initiate a recall for the 2,767 vehicles involved.
This is particularly unwelcome news for Vauxhall, as it follows hot on the heels of a similar set of recalls undergone by the Zafira B several times over during the past year or so. In total 234,938 were recalled, on two occasions, to rectify the problem.
In April of this year, Vauxhall discovered a fault concerning the braking system in various 1.4-litre petrol Corsa D models, which were susceptible to water leakage that could fry the electronics; thereby potentially causing a fire. The Zafira fire issue is not connected to the Corsa one, despite the results being the same.
So far, nine cases have been reported, two of which have led to fires. Vauxhall announced a recall in April this year. 2,767 cars were affected.
Since then however, seven owners of Vauxhall Corsa D’s have contacted the BBC’s consumer rights programme Watchdog to report their cars catching fire, three of which came within the current recall criteria and four outside it.
In total, Vauxhall have sold over 700,000 Corsa D models between 2006 and 2014 in the UK.
These two episodes with the Zafira and the Corsa D are not the first time the car maker has been involved in this sort of problem. Back in 2007, over 200,000 previous generation Corsa C models built between 2003 and 2005 were recalled as a result of a fire risk caused by the anti-lock braking system short circuiting.
And in January 2016, Auto Express ran an article about a Corsa D owner who had found his car on fire despite it having been sat on his driveway for several hours. Vauxhall said they were unable to investigate this incident, as the car had been claimed by the insurance company.
A spokesman from Vauxhall said: “Customer safety is of the utmost importance and we take any report of fire very seriously. Fires can occur for a wide variety of reasons and it’s worth noting that, on average, there are 18,000 vehicle fires a year across all manufacturers in the UK. It is estimated that there are around 35 million vehicles registered in the UK.”
