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Hyundai Fined $17.35 Million For Delayed Recall

Hyundai has agreed to pay a $17.35 million fine for delayed reporting of a brake defect affecting Genesis luxury cars, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Thursday. The defect involves corrosion in critical brake system components that can reduce braking effectiveness and increase the risk of a crash, NHTSA said. Hyundai was aware in 2012 that brake fluids used in the model year 2009-2012 Genesis cars did not sufficiently inhibit corrosion in key components of the vehicle's brake system, the agency said. But rather than issue a recall, Hyundai instructed dealers to change the brake fluid in affected vehicles without explaining the consequences that failure to take that action might have, NHTSA said. Hyundai also did not inform Genesis owners of the potential safety consequences, the agency said. Hyundai recalled 27,500 of the cars in October 2012 just hours before the government opened an investigation. "Hyundai failed to act to protect their customers and others that were harmed in an accident, and must change the way they deal with all safety related defects," David Friedman, head of the safety administration, said in a statement. About 70 percent of the affected Genesis cars have been repaired so far, the safety administration said. Hyundai is committed to ensuring immediate action in response to potential safety concerns, including the prompt reporting of safety defects, said Jim Trainor, a senior group manager for Hyundai Motor America. "In order to mitigate a situation like this in the future, Hyundai is instituting new organizational and process improvements, and enhancing the ability of its U.S. leadership team to readily respond to regulatory reporting requirements," he said in an email. In May, the safety administration slapped General Motors with a record $35 million fine Friday for taking more than a decade to disclose an ignition-switch defect in millions of cars that has been linked to at least 13 deaths. Earlier this year, after a four-year criminal investigation, the Justice Department made Toyota pay $1.2 billion for concealing unintended acceleration problems from NHTSA. No individuals were charged with a crime. Related Gallery Safest Crossovers For The Budget-Conscious Family View 10 Photos Recalls Genesis Hyundai NHTSA brakes

Ford fights back against patent trolls

Some people are just awful. Some organizations are just as awful. And when those people join those organizations, we get stories like this one, where Ford has spent the past several years combatting so-called patent trolls. According to Automotive News, these malicious organizations have filed over a dozen lawsuits against the company since 2012. They work by purchasing patents, only to later accuse companies of misusing intellectual property, despite the fact that the so-called patent assertion companies never actually, you know, do anything with said intellectual property. AN reports that both Hyundai and Toyota have been victimized by these companies, with the former forced to pay $11.5 million to a company called Clear With Computers. Toyota, meanwhile, settled with Paice LLC, over its hybrid tech. The world's largest automaker agreed to pay $5 million, on top of $98 for every hybrid it sold (if the terms of the deal included each of the roughly 1.5 million hybrids Toyota sold since 2000, the company would have owed $147 million). Including the previous couple of examples, AN reports 107 suits were filed against automakers last year alone. But Ford is taking action to prevent further troubles... kind of. The company has signed on with a firm called RPX, in what sounds strangely like a protection racket. Automakers like Ford pay RPX around $1.5 million each year for access to its catalog of patents, which it spent nearly $1 billion building. "We take the protection and licensing of patented innovations very seriously," Ford told AN via email. "And as many smart businesses are doing, we are taking proactive steps to protect against those seeking patent infringement litigation." What are your thoughts on this? Should this patent business be better managed? Is it reasonable that companies purchase patents only to file suit against the companies that build actual products? Have your say in Comments.

Strange, unfunny Hyundai N Performance commercials badly miss the mark

Take a minute and watch the video above. After, you might have questions. I will try to help you with these. But first, here are some questions for you: No matter whether you thought the ad was good or not, does it get you excited about the N Performance subbrand? Do you want to find out more about it? I suspect the answer is "no" for most of you reading. Unfortunately, reading what Hyundai and the ad agency said about these ads isn't going to help much. Intended to skewer traditional luxury advertising tropes, the agency says, these ads are a "tongue-(stuck firmly)-in-cheek poke at automotive and luxury brands taking themselves too seriously." R/GA is the ad agency behind these ads, and its chief creative officer, James Temple, told AdAge, "We want people to rethink their views of Hyundai as a practical, compromise choice, to a brand which shows people through the power of 'N' that they make cars that are fun to drive and which aren't like anything else out there." OK. So, poke fun at luxury and automotive advertising that takes itself too seriously. And to be fair, this sort of thing has been done before to great success and general acclaim. Remember Volkswagen's "Unpimp The Auto" campaign? It cleverly took aim at a then-trendy aspect of the tuner culture and literally crushed it with a new GTI. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. The message was clear: Your over-tuned Ford Focus is both gaudy and inferior. Step up to a GTI, which by the logic of the ad, you don't need to throw tuner parts at to have fun. It built excitement for the hot hatch while earning some automotive credibility by throwing shade at MTV's over-the-top " Pimp My Ride," at that point rapidly losing its halo of tuner coolness. "Pimp My Ride" was a big, easy target to mock. And the relationship to automotive performance (or lack thereof (most were plays on the "Yo dawg I heard you like ..." theme, anyways) made the analogy work. Where the Hyundai ads step off is the target for ridicule. R/GA claims it's roasting automotive brands, and they can say that all they want — I don't see it. I see a childlike understanding of how to dismantle the tropes of a classic Calvin Klein ad — monotone, lots of black, shirtless models, personal beauty products — over which the lightest veneer of automotive reference is applied. So the perfume smells like burning tires. That's still a humorous ad about perfume.