Subaru Steps Up Quality Control After Embarrassing Growing Pains

Remember the I Love Lucy sketch when Lucy gets a job at a factory where she has to wrap chocolates? She’s feeling pretty smug over how well she is performing until they accelerate the line and candies begin spilling out onto the floor and she scrambles around trying to save them all.

Well Subaru is suffering from a similar, less hysterical, problem right now with its own quality control.

The Japanese automaker has continued to break its own sales records over the last decade. However, during this rocket ride to planet sales, the company has seen a gradual lapse in quality. There was an influx of recalls this year and the company also saw itself drop six places in this year’s Consumer Reports reliability rating.

Subaru and its parent company, Fuji Heavy Industries, don’t want to make a habit of this.

During an interview with Automotive News, Fuji CEO Yasuyuki Yoshinaga said quality was Subaru’s primary concern and the company has begun efforts to avoid future problems while continuing to manage its impressive and consistent growth.

“We’ve always been focusing on quality, but we did have an increase in recalls,” Yoshinaga said. “We’ve assigned a former FHI officer who was in charge of global quality assurance to oversee and enhance Subaru’s quality in the U.S. market.”

Like many rapidly expanding automotive manufacturers, Subaru’s lapse in quality is almost certainly due to its maturation. Growing pains are somewhat inevitable, especially for a company blooming quite as boldly as this one. Subaru has eight consecutive record-breaking years under its belt in North America, and it hasn’t dealt with a singly monthly sales decline since 2011.

The company expects this sales trend to continue well into next year, Yoshinaga told Automotive News, even as he acknowledged that U.S. market demand “has already peaked out.”

Still, the demand has forced Subaru to increase production wherever it can.

“The background of our current situation is Subaru’s rapid sales growth that has caused strain to our U.S. production and to our suppliers,” Yoshinaga said. “Having recalls like we’ve had this year, we realize the strong need to strengthen our effort to ensure high quality.”

The infamous Takata airbag inflator callbacks affecting nearly every major automaker didn’t help, but there was also an increase in Subie-centric recalls this year. Subaru issued a callback of 77,000 Tribeca SUVs due to an unsafe hood latch in February. May had Subaru finding around 48,500 Legacy sedans and Outback wagons that needed problematic steering columns fixed. The biggest recall happened last month, when the company said 100,000 of its turbocharged motors ran the risk of failure and even starting a potential fire.

Consumer Reports seemed more interested in faulting the company for the introduction of buggy electronics and safety systems.

“They were a little slow to adopt the advanced electronics,” Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, told Automotive News. “They slipped from being excellent to quite good. I’m sure they can recover.”