General Motors has announced a recall of 5,000 heavy-duty vans over engine fire risks, promising to halt production and sale of the vehicles until it can fix a faulty alternator.
The safety recall, announced on Friday, concerns Chevrolet Express and GMC Savana passenger and cargo vans built in February and March this year.
GM urged customers who purchased the vans to stop driving them, park them outside away from buildings and other vehicles and to disconnect both battery cables if possible.
“Relatively few” of the faulty vans have been purchased by customers, the automaker noted.
About 1,300 of them are in rental and other fleets, it added. GM issued a stop sale order on Friday to prevent fleet-owned vans from being rented and those on dealer lots from being sold. Other vehicles were being held at dealerships or ports before exportation.
Only the 2500 and 3500 Series vans were affected by the recall, as light-duty Express and Savana vans use a different alternator.
“The stop sale and production halt are measures being taken to assure customer safety until we have a repair procedure,” GM executive director of safety and interiors Jeff Boyer said in a statement.
Although limited in scope, the recall was the second in a month for GM, which announce early this month it was recalling 1.3 million Chevrolet Cobalt and Pontiac G5 cars in North America over a potentially faulty power steering motor.
The problems come amid heightened safety concerns at GM’s Japanese rival Toyota, whose series of defects have led to the global recall of more than eight million vehicles.
