If you're spending big money on an Aston Martin, you'd like to know that everything on it works as it should. Particularly the gas pedal, connecting you to some of the most sonorous powerplants available in any vehicle. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case of late, and the British sports car manufacturer has had to expand an original 2013 recall for fragile gas pedal arms to include virtually three quarters of the cars it's produced since 2008.
Aston Martin has blamed the manufacturing defect causing the recall on Chinese suppliers. According to The New York Times, the automaker's investigations have revealed that a 'tier three' supplier "used counterfeit material". The company has been unable to replicate failures in testing, but discovered during testing that the potentially faulty gas pedal arms were made from the wrong material.
As a result of these findings, its original recall of 689 vehicles in the U.S. has been expanded to 5,001 examples, and covers all of its major models since the 2008 model year--from the V8 Vantage and DB9, to the latest 2014 Aston Martin Rapide S. Worldwide, the recall affects 17,590 vehicles--including those originally recalled due to the same defect. No accidents have been reported as a result of the problem and Aston Martin's inconclusive findings in testing mean it's unable to say how many cars are potentially affected.
The supplier of the genuine material specified by Aston Martin, DuPont, is now delivering batches of the correct material to mold new pedal arms, and will supervise, along with representatives from Aston Martin, production of the replacement pedal arms. As a further measure, Aston Martin plans to resource production of the pedal arms from China to the U.K. to prevent further issues.
The list of recalled vehicles are as follows:
2008-2014 V8 Vantage
2011-2014 V8 Vantage S
2011-2012 V12 Vantage
2012 Virage
2008-2014 DB9
2009-2012 DBS
2010-2012 Rapide
2014 Rapide S
Aston Martin is in the process of notifying owners. The solution will require dealers to replace the gas pedal assemblies, a service that they will offer free of charge. For further information you can contact the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at 1-888-327-4236 (reference recall campaign number 14V010000) or Aston Martin at 1-888-923-9988.
_______________________________________
