Products and services must be provided without jeopardizing safety for end-users. It is a fact that failures that compromise the health or safety of the user of the product (or with other people that interact with it) are recognized as one of the biggest problems for any manufacturer, mainly if these failures are identified after the product sales which leads to the necessity of the recall, where the manufacturer is responsible for a corrective action under the country’s legislation. In this work, the reasons and causes of the automotive recall were studied from 2011 to 2019, with emphasis on failures resulting from the production process. This research comprised all models and brands of national and or imported vehicles marketed in Brazil in the period, which represented a total of 886 Brazilian automotive recalls were studied individually, and 13,930,803 motor vehicles involved in recalls. The recalls were divided into two main causes: defects arising from failures in product development and/or the manufacturing process. Product development failures are associated with product development, product specifications, validations, and tests, while failures in the manufacturing process are associated with the development of manufacturing processes, control processes, defects in manufacturing devices, human failures, incorrect storage, damage to the product during the distribution and use of defective or wrong raw materials. When adding up all the vehicles from this research sample, it was observed that the product recall was responsible for 72.95% while the recall due to process failures was responsible for 27.05% of the total vehicles. At the end of this work, the trends of the Brazilian automotive recall will be presented, as soon as their causes and whether there have been advances or not in these serious quality problems that are the cause of automotive recalls.
Recall; Automotive industry; Quality