Bought a lemon knowingly and rented them out like hot cakes
Uber and its leasing company is facing fresh round of backlash after the Wall Street Journal revealed that Uber knowingly purchase more than 1000 defective Honda Vezels and leased to Uber drivers in Singapore despite knowing that Honda had recalled that car model. The vehicles were rented out without fixing the defective parts
In January 2017, a Uber driver in Singapore smelled smoke in the vehicle when the car caught fire and melted the interior and cracked a hole in his car windscreen. Thankfully nobody was inured in the incident. The incident though did caused alarm at Uber as they contemplated on what to do. They decided to keep the car running on the road and got all the affected to come in and deactivate the faulty parts until the replacement parts were made available.
According to Wall Street Journal, emails showed that Uber’s insurance provider in Singapore stated that it would not cover the damage from the fire accident as it was a known problem and cars ere being recalled. There were also plans to remove the vehicle altogether from the Lion City fleet of vehicles but email revealed that it would cost $1.4m dollars a week to do that and send paniic alarms to the market.
“We acknowledge we could have done more—and we have done so.”
Uber said the company has since improved its recall processes and now has a standard protocol in place which did not exist before.
Since the beginning of the year Uber says it has “proactively” responded to six recalls.
An Uber spokesperson said, “As soon as we learned of a Honda Vezel from the Lion City Rental fleet catching fire, we took swift action to fix the problem, in close coordination with Singapore’s Land Transport Authority as well as technical experts.
Question that Uber Drivers in Singapore are asking now
- Why was the known defect and risk not announced by Uber/ Lion City Rental? It could have put Drivers and Riders lives at stake
- If LTA is aware of it, why did it not come out and stopped all these Honda Vezels from plying the road since it is a danger to road users? Isn’t stopping these fire-prone vehicles more important that catching vehicles who make minor traffic offence
