
Accident-damaged vehicles that were shoddily repaired and put back on the market have been linked to exacerbating the carnage that plays out on South Africa’s roads every day.
As car prices continue to climb in South Africa, cash-strapped consumers are increasingly looking for cheaper options to satisfy their transport needs.
This has created a lucrative avenue for unscrupulous mechanics and dealers to purchase accident-damaged or even written-off vehicles and cheaply repair them for sale to unsuspecting individuals.
The buyers generally think they are getting a good deal as the vehicle is usually cleaned up well and advertised as having a clean bill of health.
It’s not until the deal is done and the customer takes the vehicle home that they start noticing serious red flags, and by that time it’s generally too late as the dealer has already cut all contact and refuses to play ball when they try to return the car or get it fully repaired.
While there are remedies for the situation as stipulated in the Consumer Protection Act, it can usually be a lengthy process to reverse the transaction and one that’s not always guaranteed.
Therefore, Managing Director of Halo Health, Richard Green, highlights that it’s important for consumers to understand the mechanical condition of a vehicle before purchasing it.
“It is my view and the view of many in our industry that because many vehicles are written off, thousands of them every year by insurers, they are sent through a salvage system and are often fed back into the used-car system after being repaired by unscrupulous motor body repairers, and we believe that those vehicles actually cause accidents,” Green told SABC News.
He said it’s difficult to track the whereabouts of a vehicle after it has been written off by insurers so doing your due diligence before a purchase has become more important today than it has ever been before.
Alarmingly, Green notes that missing airbags are among the most prevalent issues in accident-repaired vehicles as they are easy to hide and hard to check up on.
“I’d like to caution [consumers] to perhaps even take any second-hand car that they are not 100% satisfied with to their trusted motor body repairer and let them put it up on a jack, let them have a look at the chassis and the safety-critical components, check through the electronics whether an airbag is present, and make sure that the vehicle is, in fact, safe to go on the roads,” said Green.
“Those are really important things to remember.”
The National Consumer Commission (NCC) revealed that it has received an increasing number of complaints in recent times regarding the quality and safety of second-hand vehicles.
NCC spokesperson Phetho Ntaba said that these complains are generally referred to the Consumer Tribunal who in most cases rules in favour of the consumer.
“This actually tells you that there is a problem in the market,” said Ntaba.
The NCC is engaging with roleplayers in the industry such as dealers and salespeople to see how it can improve protection for buyers of used autos.
It has urged salespeople to be honest and transparent about the histories of the vehicles they sell so as to foster trust within the used-car marketplace.
“It is within the consumer’s right to receive that particular information so that they can decide whether to purchase the car or not,” said Ntaba.
Call to car insurers
With the growing prevalence of shoddily repaired vehicles making it into the used-car marketplace, entities such as the South African Motor Body Repairer’s Association (Sambra) has called for an open and transparent Vehicle Salvage Database to be made available to the public so that consumers can make an informed decision.
At present, buyers are in the dark when shopping for a new set of wheels as there is little information available on a particular model’s past.
While the South African Insurance Association’s VIN-Lookup website, launched in September 2023, attempts to shed light on the previous doings of used vehicles for potentially new owners, it leaves much to be desired.
The website only covers vehicles that have been classified as Code 3 (rebuilt), 3A (spare parts only), and 4 (permanently demolished) by one of the SAIA members – which includes the majority, but not all, of South Africa’s top insurers.
It was initially also supposed to offer Code 2 (Used) vehicle information, but SAIA reversed its decision to make this data publicly available to protect the interests of car dealers.
This means that the VIN-Lookup site only covers a very, very small portion of vehicles; as such consumers are basically no better off than they were before the introduction of the platform.
Sambra thus implores SAIA to make Code 2 vehicle information available to consumers to assist them in avoiding these dangerous cars.
Sambra dealt with many cases of shoddily repaired vehicles in the past, labeling one of them as a “rolling deathtrap on wheels” after an independent inspection uncovered 49 concerns ranging from uneven body panels and buckled rims, to missing airbags and a bent chassis.
“Based on the current example, Sambra questions again why SAIA is not equally concerned about compromising the safety of the end consumer?” said the association.
“The bottom line is that once a vehicle has been declared uneconomical to repair by an insurer and ends up at a salvage yard, it is then fair game for anyone and that is where we lose total control.”
Additionally, Sambra has called on government to add legislation that determines the Code status of a car which in turn can be uploaded and housed on the existing national traffic information system (eNatis).
According to Sambra, as soon as a vehicle comes off the assembly line and is wholesaled to a dealer, a record must be kept of all its movements spanning the entire retail chain so that further down the line, any new purchaser, financier, or insurer will have access to the information, including the accident history.
It calls this a “Cradle to Grave” catalogue of a vehicle’s lifetime on the roads.
This will enable accurate valuation of the vehicle and prevent previously written-off and potentially unsafe cars from finding their way back onto the market.
“The current VIN-Lookup tool created by the South African Insurance Association is a good start, but without all vehicle data, is not as effective as it could otherwise be, nor are the eNatis records complete,” said Sambra.
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