Failure Reporting & Tracking

As part of OBD II, the government will be monitoring the results from state emissions testing programs and reviewing emissions-related warranty claims. If it appears that a particular model requires an abnormal number of emissions-related repairs the resulting investigation may trigger a recall campaign.

The purpose of this monitoring is to ensure that emissions systems will survive in the real world on cars driven and maintained by average drivers.

The familiar "shotgun" approach to diagnosis which is based on guesswork and throwing parts at a car rather than logically looking for the real cause of a problem will cause monumental headaches for both dealers and manufacturers under this new program. You have all probably heard for years that the majority of ECMs and other parts which come back under warranty test out as "no fault found". Under the new monitoring program, the government won't be satisfied when a manufacturer says "things aren't really as bad as they look, most of those parts weren't really broken". This will only shift their attention to the effectiveness of our on-board diagnostics, training and repair procedures.

Naturally, our goal is to produce cars which never fail. Until we reach that point we must work together to ensure that cars which do break are repaired quickly and accurately.

In California, statistics shall be made based on the repairs performed under the regulated emissions warranty. At certain levels of warranty claims different activities are triggered. The warranty claims are accumulated throughout the useful life (10 years/100.000 miles) for each engine family in California. Note that the warranty claims used for this purpose are unscreened and include adjustment, inspection, repair or replacement of a component for which the workshop requests warranty compensations, regardless of whether the compensation is actually provided.