Get back on the road quickly?
Autodealerbedrijf Van Mossel thinks that the repairs for the large recall of Citroëns in the Netherlands will take approximately seven to ten days. According to a spokesperson, the Citroën dealers of the concern, which are mainly located in Noord-Holland, expect to repair approximately 3,300 cars with defective airbags.
“When we have the airbags, and they are coming soon, we will need a week to ten days to help customers with replacements,” said the spokesperson. Van Mossel has set up an additional call center due to the recall. Citroën’s parent company Stellantis reimburses the repairs.
The recall concerns 33,260 Citroëns C3 and DS3 manufactured between 2009 and 2019. Stellantis is calling on owners not to drive these cars until a defective airbag has been replaced. Airbags from manufacturer Takata can explode when activated, causing metal parts to fly around. Recently, a motorist in France died as a result of this.
Van Mossel has sold a total of 7,000 of the Citroëns in question. But part of it drives in an area where it makes more sense to take the cars to other garages, the spokesperson explains.
With the summer holidays approaching, it is often a busy time for car garages. But industry organization Bovag says that repairs with a higher priority, such as in recalls, are given priority. The umbrella organization could not give an overall expectation about the duration of the recall. Stellantis also did not respond directly to the question of how long the recall would last.
Stellantis came up with a so-called stop drive recall, in which motorists are strongly asked not to drive the car. According to a spokesperson for the Association of Insurers, anyone who does so and has an accident is unlikely to have problems with the insurance. “Unless very strange things happen, people are simply covered. In theory, an insurer could find that someone has been negligent. But then you would have to be able to prove very well that the damage was caused by the defect for which the recall applies and someone knew about it. In practice, that will be very difficult,” he says. Moreover, the largest part of motorists’ insurance is a Statutory Liability Insurance, for damage or injury that a motorist causes to someone else. These cases are covered anyway.