Fifteen legal mandates have been devised for upgrading the quality and safety of domestic cars and unless automakers abide by them, no presale of vehicles will be allowed, the head of the Institute of Standards and Industrial Research of Iran said.
“Automakers must live up to their commitments to the people and improve the quality of their products, otherwise their vehicles will not be licensed in cooperation with the police department,” Mehdi Eslampanah was also quoted as saying by the news portal of Car.ir.
The Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade has notified the legal mandates to automakers, who subsequently pledged to implement them.
One of the mandates stipulates that if the time interval between the production of a car and its supply to sales agents or delivery to customer is more than two months, automakers are obliged to re-inspect the vehicle’s body parts and any damage inflicted by natural factors, and submit a report to ISIRI.
As per another mandate, car manufacturers are obliged to strictly refrain from conducting a presale of cars before obtaining ISIRI’s approval, and to pull any advertisement as soon as the approval is suspended or revoked.
The issue of car safety once again came to the fore after traffic police officers reported that none of the airbags of domestic cars involved in the chain collision of 59 vehicles failed to deploy.
The horrific accident, which claimed the lives of five people, took place on the Behbahan-Ahvaz highway in Khuzestan Province on Jan. 10.
Eslampanah emphasized that minimal standards have been set for domestic automakers, but they refuse to implement them under various pretexts.
ISIRI had issued a one-month deadline for automakers to implement structural reforms in their production and supply lines. After the deadline’s expiry, it issued the mandates.
Due to the high volume of cars that remain incomplete due to lack of parts and the recent mandates, car manufacturers will find it very difficult to conduct presales anytime soon.
Incomplete Car Output Probed
Iran’s General Inspection Organization had recently announced that it called the CEOs of two major automakers (Iran Khodro Company (IKCO) and SAIPA) to find out why the downtrend in the production of incomplete vehicles has not continued.
According to GIO, the officials were summoned following specialized meetings and field visits to IKCO, SAIPA and parts manufacturers to get a full picture of these incomplete vehicles.
Previous reports had announced that the automakers had agreed on a schedule to complete the cars lacking components concurrent with the implementation of the approved price correction during the current fiscal year’s eighth month (Oct. 23-Nov. 21).
As the price correction was canceled one day after the announcement, the number of incomplete vehicles started increasing instead of declining. On the one hand, large component manufacturers, especially electronics suppliers, had lost their working capital due to a growing backlog of overdue receivables, and on the other, there wasn’t enough liquidity to import the needed parts.
In fact, the supply of these items became scarce worldwide due to the Covid-19 pandemic and even well-known foreign automakers are grappling with this problem. Therefore, the automakers were unable to complete unfinished vehicles and sell them to reduce car market inflation.
The auto producers claimed that in view of these problems, the rise in incomplete cars in their factories’ parking lots should not be considered as an example of hoarding.
Confirming the above, Hojjatollah Firouzi, a member of Majlis Industries and Mines Commission, said summons issued for the directors of the two major automakers was an invitation to hear their explanations, not a summon by a judicial official to hear their defense, Donyaye Khodro reported.
Main Reason Behind Incomplete Car Output
In this regard, the executive vice president of Iran Khodro Industrial Group considered the scarcity of electronic parts as the main factor behind the rising number of incomplete cars.
Hamid Moradi added that statistics of vehicles with deficit parts will be announced periodically to the relevant authorities, stressing that this problem has disrupted the global electronics supply process.
The official noted that the closure of one of the companies producing these items was an important factor behind the parts supply problem.
"Problems in some supplier countries of raw materials have led to a sharp decline in the production of silicon, a raw material vital for the production of electronic items," he said.
