General Motors has told all dealers in the United States and Canada to stop selling both the 2013 and 2014 Chevy Cruze. This is a result of potential airbag defects.
This is a different problem than the airbag defect that prompted the recall of 3 million vehicles by Mazda, Nissan, and Honda earlier this week. All the affected airbags in both the earlier recall and this stop-sale are supplied by Takata.
The first recall involved faulty airbag inflators that had the possibility of preventing the airbag from inflating correctly during a crash. The airbag inflator could explode on activation, causing shrapnel to fly at vehicle passengers.
Dealers were notified of the stop-sale order on the Cruze yesterday which affects roughly 33,000 vehicles in the US and Canada. GM is currently at work identifying exactly which vehicles are affected by the problem so dealers can continue to sell the cars not affected.
A stop-sale order isn’t a recall and affects just those vehicles on dealer lots. The possibility that potentially affected vehicles are in customer hands has not yet been addressed by GM. The Chevy Cruze is GM’s top-selling car, so lifting the stop-sale as quickly as possible is a priority.
This is the second time they’ve issued a stop-sale order on the Chevy Cruze this year. The first time around was in March for all Cruze’s with a 1.4-liter engine. Shortly after they issued a recall of about 175,000 of the cars for a potentially defective right front axle shaft.
Nicole Wakelin fell in love with cars as a teenager when she got to go for a ride in a Ferrari. It was red and it was fast and that was all that mattered. Game over. She considers things a bit more carefully now, but still has a weakness for fast, beautiful cars. Nicole is a member of the New England Motor Press Association and also writes for Automotive IT News, NerdApproved, and GeekMom. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
