Our Passion Cabriolet was one of the Smarts recalled on account of the defective paint on the Tridion cell and it's been over 6 weeks since the dealer has had our car. Including ours, our dealer sold 4 cars that are subject to this recall. For the past 4 weeks the dealer has been telling us that our car has been in the body shop and little else, such as what exactly is being done and when we can expect to have the car back. I telephoned Smart USA this past week and spoke with the Mid-Atlantic representative. He told me that 43 cars have been recalled and that while Smart was proactive in notifying customers and quarantining the cars, the company did not have sufficient materials in place to effect the repairs. According to the representative, the repair will entail removing the windshield and body panels from the car, stripping the paint from the cell, repainting the cell (which will involve a 4-step process), and reattaching the windshield and body panels. However, I still wasn't given an ETA regarding the return of our Passion Cabriolet.
Our Passion Cabriolet was one of the Smarts recalled on account of the defective paint on the Tridion cell and it's been over 6 weeks since the dealer has had our car. Including ours, our dealer sold 4 cars that are subject to this recall. For the past 4 weeks the dealer has been telling us that our car has been in the body shop and little else, such as what exactly is being done and when we can expect to have the car back. I telephoned Smart USA this past week and spoke with the Mid-Atlantic representative. He told me that 43 cars have been recalled and that while Smart was proactive in notifying customers and quarantining the cars, the company did not have sufficient materials in place to effect the repairs. According to the representative, the repair will entail removing the windshield and body panels from the car, stripping the paint from the cell, repainting the cell (which will involve a 4-step process), and reattaching the windshield and body panels. However, I still wasn't given an ETA regarding the return of our Passion Cabriolet.
ALL the Metal pars of our beloved smart cars are Powder coated. If true that there is a recall of 40 some odd smarts for Trition coating failure... the repair is going to be very tedious. Stripping the coating back is a mechanical or chemical process very few body shops are prepared to do... Because there is absolutely no way to remove the assembled car parts back down to raw metal substructures there is no way to re-shoot an area and place it in an oven to melt/cure the coating...
So the shop must be set up for "spot cure" method with IR lamps....
BUT long before any of that happens, they NEED to know from MB and smart EXACTLY the locations of the corrosive failure areas and IF they are even accessible for IR heat cure
This is going to be a mess for those 40+ owners and the poor service centers stuck with fixing those VINs....
Powder coat is a superior coating to paint...until it needs repaired...then it is a serious challenge to do correctly...
Lemon laws are two edged swords.... and unfortunately this is a low density car with Zero replacements available in a reasonable time.... Best the Manufacture (MB/smart) can possibly do is offer a buy back and apology...
I strongly believe that it is unfair to leave the dealer holding the bag...but I suspect smart USA will do just that... Hell, call me cynical but so far David S has NOT proved to be a stand up guy
My recommendation would be to contact smart USA and tell them that one of the big selling points of the car was the powder-coated Tridion frame and the ecological aspects of that production method.
Keep your powder dry
The entire vehicle bodywork of smart is powder coated rather than painted. Powder coating uses 40% less energy than conventional painting methods with zero solvent emissions and no water consumption. Powder "overspray" is collected and is 98% reusable. This is a great example of eco-friendly solutions that also provide excellent finish quality.
I would tell them that you don't want one that's been in some body shop where they used toxic solvents to strip the powder coating. What are they going to say? That protecting the environment is only important in France?
I'd tell them that you want a car that has been finished in the smart factory using factory methods, materials, and facilities -- not one that has been an experiment at some local body shop.
To hell with the waiting list. Every dealer gets orphan smart cars and your dealer can be directed to give you the first one that can be configured identically to your defective one.
40 cars out of 20,000 doesn't sound like much at first, but the negative publicity from this could hurt the brand. The only positive is that they recognized a serious safety hazard and quarantined cars that are likely to pose a danger to others. Smart needs to go beyond due diligence here and step up with a patch or something if repair of the tridion is as tedious or precise as it seems to be. I don't know what parts are involved, but I understand it involves adhesion of plastic to metal?
Can they alter the design even slightly and allow the dealer to drill / screw the parts together to handle most of the force? Maybe some engineers can come up with a bracket design or somesuch, but it would take authorization from the highest levels within the million-car company. Do those 40 cars deserve that level of attention or do they want to just buy out the owners? That's the profit-motivated question there.
I spoke with the Service Manager of my Smart dealership today and he informs me that in addition to removing the windshield and body panels, the dashboard now also must be removed. The reason why the dashboard needs to be removed is that the paint (on the Tridion Cell) is already peeling on the inside on mine and the other recalled Smarts they have. According to him, the recommendation from Smart regarding the repaint did not account for this peeling problem. On questioning, he told me that because of the design of the Smart, removing the dashboard is not problematic. My thought is "we'll see"; I'm not particularly thrilled by the notion of receiving back a car I've owned for a little more than a month that been taken apart this extensively.
Last edited by Lisa and Leslie; 09-09-2008 at 10:11 AM.
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