2011 Volkswagen Jetta Recall, Fuse Problems Affect 17k Cars

31 March, 2011 Autos 1:36 pm

Recently whilst browsing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NTHSA) website we noticed that Volkswagen of America had announced a recall which could potentially affect up to 71,043 of their 2011 Volkswagen Jetta Models.

According to the NHTSA Volkswagen reported the recall on March 25, the components at fault are some of the car’s circuit breakers and fuses. The recall summary says the electrical wiring and fuse layout shares the same fuse for the signal horn, anti-theft alarm system and converter box, which could mean that if the fuse is blown the engine management system, wipers and lighting system could all cut out.

Apparently this problem affects certain Jetta models which were manufactured between March 2010 and March 2011, Volkswagen worry that if power was cut out to these important components a crash could be caused.

If you think that you may be affected by the recall you can contact Volkswaken on 1-800-822-8987, dealers will soon get repair kits to correct the condition, it is thought that the safety recall will begin in May 2011 and will be free of charge to the car owner.

Hopefully this problem will not cause any crashes between now and May, if you have any concerns you can also contact the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on their hotline 1-888-327-4236 (TTY 1-800-424-9153) or go to the SafetyCar website.

Is your vehicle affected by this recall, if so do you think it is acceptable having to wait until May for the repair?

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http://www.fr.yogitech.com/ Don Devine

The automotive industry, in this period of multiple recalls of cars from the little to luxurious are tackling the safety issues.
To keep the heavy tech talk to a minimum, the internal parts such as engine controllers, are being developed with new Safety Standards (ISO 26262) which address the issue of systematic failures and random hardware faults. These are faults which take down the cars engine systems controllers. They reduce the “availability” of the system and thus create potential risk conditions for drivers.

They mainly occur within the micro-chips (Systems on Chips, SoCs) which now have millions of transistors inside, all connected via wires which are nanometers wide. The car system problems are becoming more frequent because these micro-chips are using ever decreasing Deep Sub-Micron Technologies which augment the probability of failure of physical parts purely due to their “small size” e.g. things like voltage spikes ruining transistor substrates.

So, how are these issues being addressed? Well YOGITECH S.p.A (a small 25 person company) saw this phenomenon coming more than 4 years ago and patented a method for both analysing and designing “Fault Robust” safety modules for micro-chips which can detect and sometimes correct errors within microseconds of the problem occurring. YOGITECH’s technology is now allowing companies, which design engine controllers for car makers for example, to produce designs which are “Fault Robust” and as such increase their “availability” and therefore drastically reducing the probability of risky downtime.
You can get some more details on the website http://www.fr.yogitech.com/

Don Devine (YOGITECH)