The government does not plan to abolish the Vehicle Safety Certification Center, which would later this year implement a new rating system to evaluate vehicle safety, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said on Friday.
The center, which was established in 2009, is a nonprofit organization supervised by the ministry. It is in charge of conducting motor vehicle safety inspections, recalling motor vehicles according to the ministry’s instructions and updating motor vehicle regulations to ensure that they are in sync with international norms.
However, someone has proposed on the government’s online public policy platform that the center be abolished and a national certification center be established, adding that the government should step up efforts to administer vehicle crash tests.
Regulations similar to “lemon laws” in the US are urgently needed to address safety issues caused by defective motor vehicles, given a series of manufacturing defects reported in vehicles manufactured by Volkswagen, Volvo, Mazda and Toyota in the past few years, the person said.
“Consumers lack the legal recourse to seek compensation from car manufacturers for the purchase of defective vehicles,” they said.
The center has on multiple occasions said that it lacks the capacity to gauge defective motor vehicles and has no motivation to expand the capacity, they added.
The person accused the center of having raised a sizeable amount of operational funds from auto manufacturers’ associations, which they said is a conflict of interest.
The petition had collected 5,090 signatures as of yesterday, requiring the government agency in charge to give a formal response.
“The nation’s vehicle safety management would be greatly disrupted if the center were to be abolished,” the ministry said in a statement.
Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang (唐鳳) on Oct. 22 last year convened a meeting where the petitioner and government officials discussed the possibility of establishing a mechanism to identify motor vehicle defects and other related issues, the ministry said.
The center is expanding a list of organizations that can determine whether a motor vehicle has major manufacturing defects and would publish it on an auto safety Web site (https://www.car-safety.org.tw/), the ministry said, adding that it is also raising the number of valid car defects that these organizations should address.
After consulting regulations governing the management of defective motor vehicles in other countries, the Ministry of Economic Affairs has since July 1 last year enforced a new standardized contract for vehicle transactions, the transportation ministry said.
“The new standardized contract allows car owners to cancel the contract or request an exchange for a new car within six months after the car is delivered or when the mileage is under 12,000km, if the car has a major defect that cannot be fixed after a reasonable number of repair attempts,” it said.
The center is also stipulating regulations and expanding inspection capacity before it implements the “Taiwan New Car Assessment Program” in the fourth quarter of this year to evaluate the safety of new vehicles, with evaluation results scheduled to be published in the first quarter of next year, the ministry said.
Consumers can use evaluation results as reference when purchasing new vehicles, it added.
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