Johannesburg - Suzuki Auto SA has confirmed that Celerio hatchbacks on the South African market are not affected by the safety recall of cars in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, following a total brake failure during testing by Autocar magazine.
As part of its standard road-test protocol the UK magazine had taken a Celerio belonging to the Suzuki GB test fleet to Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire on 30 January for performance testing.
While driving on the road and during gentle braking after the standard acceleration tests, it said, the brakes worked normally - but when the test driver stood on the pedal to measure the car's stopping distance in an emergency stop from 130km/h, the pedal went straight to the floor and stayed there without any braking effect whatsoever.
Jamming his toes under the pedal to lift it back to the top of its travel and then pressing it again produced no result - the pedal simply dropped straight to the floor.
SECOND FAILURE
Millbrook has lots of run-off room, however, and he managed to bring the Celerio safely to a stop by gearing down and using the handbrake. He immediately contacted Suzuki GB, which arranged to come and collect the car, and bring a replacement Celerio so the magazine could continue with pre-arranged testing.
But the second Celerio also experienced total brake failure when the AutoCar test driver hit the pedal for an emergency braking test.
At that point Suzuki GB withdrew the test fleet, advised dealers not to take Celerio customers on test drives and began contacting people who had already taken delivery of their cars - about 100 in total in the four affected markets - to tell them not to drive their Celerios and offer them a loan car of another Suzuki model until such time as the factory in Rayang, Thailand had figured out what was causing the problem and how to fix it.
And that's the crux of the matter: UK-spec Celerios are made in Thailand, those on the South African market come from the Maruti Suzuki plant in India and have a different brake master cylinder.
Maruti Suzuki has said that the Indian Celerio has been in production for nearly a year without any reports of brake failures, so no recall of Indian-made Celerios is deemed necessary.