MG Motor was under the radar for the last few days and the company has been trying to save the reputation in a case where one of the new MG Hector cars caught fire in the middle of the road in New Delhi on 20th January 2020. The news wasn’t received so easily by prospective buyers, current owners, and the media around as the MG Hector is one of the widely growing models in the market at that price point.
Now, when the owner saw smokes coming out of the engine bay, he immediately got off the car and the car’s front was engulfed in the fire. When the fire was extinguished, the entire front of the MG Hector was seen damaged and that included the dashboard as well as the front seats, while not leaving the engine bay area. As it is common for people to share these incidents on social media, it didn’t take long before this story went viral, but it was more than usual for the reason that it is a car that has been getting a lot of bookings recently.
As a part of the damage control, MG Motor released an official statement saying that they have learned about the situation and had started investigations, one with their internal team of expert engineers who are specially trained for these situations, and second being an external agency that worked under the Government to investigate the details and find the root cause.
As per the investigations, the electrical connections, as well as the oil and fuel line of the car, were all intact, meaning that these were not the cause of the fire. The investigation also revealed the presence of foreign material and its debris, which was in a completely charred condition and the probable cause of the fire could be a cleaning cloth or something similar that came in contact with the high-temperature parts of the exhaust system.
At times like these when it easily looks shady for a consumer, the statement also mentions that the customer and his family are very satisfied with the response from the company and they are happily driving another Hector.
Later, there was a statement sent by Bhupender Singh, Turner Logistics who is the customer of the vehicle that caught fire. In that statement, he mentions that he had fitted some accessories in the car at the dealership which could be the reason for the incident. Now, if that is the reason, why wouldn’t it be investigated to find out which accessories were fitted and why would they catch fire when the internals of the car were all good and not the reason for the car to catch fire.
There’s no doubt that a car brand with its first car in the Indian market would bring a car after rigorous testing and thus, we won’t make it a clear case against MG Motor here, but the fact that the customer is happy with a new car and is rubbing off everything else by saying that he has fitted some accessories raises some doubts regarding the entire situation here. Remember, this is not the first incident of the same model catching fire and the situation getting in control within a week. But if, in fact, MG Motor has it in control and knows that this is an external cause and not something to do with the engine bay area, that should be a sigh of relief for the customers and the prospective buyers, as we have been hearing from people that they canceled their pre-booking after finding out about this incident.
The particular model of MG Hector that caught fire here is the petrol 1.5-liter engine with DCT automatic transmission and it is the Hector Sharp variant.
