Cars for Latin American market dangerously ill-equipped.
Mexico manufactures three million cars per year, making the country the fourth largest auto exporter in the world. But here’s the the thing: Mexico has no brands of its own.
No, according Associated Press reporter Adriana Gomez Licon it’s global companies “like General Motors and Nissan” who comprise the booming Mexican auto industry, and the quality of what those companies make depends on what countries the end products are being shipped to. The reporter states:
Vehicles destined to say in Mexico or go south to the rest of Latin America carry a code signifying there’s no need for anti-lock braking systems, electronic stability control, or more than two air bags, if any, in its basic models.
The exact same cars, however, if being shipped to the U.S. or Europe are as fully-equipped with safety equipment as their destination countries require.
In the last ten years auto fatalities in Mexico have increased by 58 percent while U.S. car deaths have decreased 40 percent.
So is this an ethical problem for the auto manufacturers who are saving millions of dollars at the cost of Latin American lives, or is this a regulatory matter for each country?
You can read the full story here.
photo bettyx1138 / Flickr
Hi, that is true we moved from Mexico to USA and we brought our mexican car a ford fiesta. It seems that all the Fiesta in USA were manufactured in Mexico, but there are a lot of differences as you described above, besides a mexican car costs more in Mexico than in USA with less equipment. I think that big companies just follow or take advantage of our poor government system, so we must stop corruption and then as mexicans we can demand the same quality to big companies.