The NHTSA is working to make sure you don’t stick three people on the VW ID.Buzz’s third row.
While no one enjoys dealing with a safety recall, automakers usually find themselves in the same boat as to the reason why they’d have to stage a new recall campaign. Maybe vehicles lose motive power while driving, maybe they catch fire under certain circumstances or maybe the airbags don’t deploy properly in a crash. Of course, those are all serious issues that should be promptly addressed, but the reason for Volkswagen’s latest recall is an odd one, to be sure. The company is recalling nearly 6,000 examples of its new electric ID.Buzz because the third-row seats are too wide.
That’s not a misinterpretation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)’s findings, either. Although the ID.Buzz has two third-row seats with two headrests and two seatbelts, federal safety regulators note the seating surface width of the bench is too wide to meet U.S. motor vehicle laws. The seats should have three “designated seating positions”, says the NHTSA, for how wide the bench is. As such, the seat is also out of compliance because it doesn’t have enough seatbelts to restrain three people, if someone were to actually sit between the two proper seats. In the event of an accident, that third, unbelted occupant could suffer serious injury or death, hence the recall.
Volkswagen first began investigating the issue in February, after it learned of the issue from a supplier. It spent the next month discussing the problem with that supplier and conducted Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) testing through an external testing institute, which confirmed the noncompliance (unironically) on April 1. The issue made it to the automaker’s Public Safety Committee two weeks later, on April 16.
What’s the fix?
Fortunately, it seems no one has rolled the dice by sticking a third passenger in the back row, then getting in a crash, as no field claims citing the NHTSA’s safety concerns have been made. Nevertheless, Volkswagen still has to do something to bring the ID.Buzz into compliance, so it needed to come up with a fix. And it found one: Fix unpadded trim parts to artificially limit the seating surface width to adhere to federal regulations. Definitely a strange remedy, but then again that’s a solution that VW can retrofit rather than, you know, completely redesigning the third row.
Dealers are already aware of the issue, as of April 25. Volkswagen, for its part will take a few weeks to actually notify owners, as it plans to send out mailers on June 20. From there, it will ask owners to bring their ID.Buzz in for the trim retrofit. The automaker won’t be reimbursing owners because all the affected vehicles are still within warranty…and it’s not like a typical owner would pay out-of-pocket to fix a problem that, to them, doesn’t exist.
The scope of the recall — 5,637 ID.Buzz vans in all — suggests that all ID.Buzz owners will be notified to fix the problem, eventually. Though it says the trim component hasn’t worked its way into production yet, Volkswagen will likely incorporate this fix into the assembly process for its U.S.-market ID.Buzzes moving forward.
