BEAVERTON, Ore. -

Vehicle safety-recall, monitoring, intelligence and reporting company AutoAp says its new reference guide and user’s manual for auto dealers “codifies the problems and challenges of the safety recall ecosystem.”

The reference guide and user’s manual for auto dealers, titled, “Safety Recalls: Think You’re Covered? – Mitigate Your Liability and Increase Profitability,” addresses the topic of recalls, which automotive think tank motormindz managing partner David Nathanson describes as “a cancer in the auto industry.”

In the foreword to the manual, Nathanson writes that recalls present “a grave risk to consumers and all players in the supply chain, with auto dealers on the front line.”

AutoAp says that for franchised auto dealers, 14.8% of inventory has open-safety recalls, even after checking current recall listing systems from OEMs, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, vehicle history reports and other sources.

“Our goal is to make plain to dealers the truth of the liability and loss to profit risk recalls present and remind them not to assume their safety recall identification process is protecting them,” AutoAp founder and chief executive officer and Safety Recalls author Mark Paul said in a news release.

These statistics illustrate the difference:

Actively managing safety recalls: Company A liability score 11
Not actively managing safety recalls: Company B liability score 81

Paul added, “Most dealers, when asked about their recall management practices, tell us, ‘We’re covered.’ We know from our industry analysis this is not reality — hope is not a strategy for dealing with such a dangerous risk.”

He continued, “When we first process VINs through AutoAp’s Safety Recall Dynamic Recall Management service, the reality is dealers have inventory with open safety recalls that their current recall-identification processes did not catch. Safety Recall details why this is so — and why this ‘cancerous’ risk continues to exist.”

To quantify how extensive this risk is, AutoAp has collected open rate data since 2015:

Open rates per segment
Government fleets: 36.9% open rate
Commercial fleets: 31.0%
Independent dealers: 20.3%
Franchise dealers: 14.8%
Rental car companies: 14.3%

After “professionalizing” safety recall management — implementing the necessary processes, developing a recall-handling policy, and having built safety into their culture — the results below show an 83% reduction in open rates for best-practice dealers.

Open Rates AutoAp clients
All AutoAp dealer, rental, fleet clients (average): 5.4% open rate
All AutoAp dealer clients: 4.7%
AutoAp power user clients: 2.6%