Recalls are an everyday reality in the industry, and have been since virtually forever. But it’s definitely not every day you see a vehicle from a certain brand be recalled by an entirely different manufacturer. And yet this week this is what we have, as BMW has announced a recall of the… Toyota Supra.
In reality, those familiar with the model know that it was born of a partnership between the Japanese and German automakers. Still, there’s some irony here…
As for the recall itself, BMW says it discovered this past June that some Supras were assembled without the required number of welds at the mount for the driver’s side seat-belt guide loop. The company inquired further and found some parts for the mount welding tool provided by a supplier were not adequate for carrying out welding.
Normally the mount has 13 weld spots, but in some cases three were found to be missing. A computer simulation concluded that in those cases the part could fail to hold the seat belt in the event of a crash.
For the moment, only seven vehicles have been identified as suffering from the issue. Now the question is to find those seven. Once the recall campaign is on, technicians will inspect the Supras and replace the vehicle entirely if the defect is found.
With Canada getting only 300 of the Supras in 2019, it is pretty unlikely any of the seven defective models made it to our market. But the recall does raise inevitably raise the question of the wisdom of mixing and matching the design and assembly expertise of two different automakers, in this case Toyota and BMW…