Mitsubishi said it has issued a recall of the Lancer sedan, 2016 Outlander SUV, and 2015 - 2016 Outlander Sport SUVs to fix an issue with the transmission of the said vehicles.
According to MotorTrend, the recalled vehicles come equipped with constant velocity transmissions (CVT) that has been found to lag in acceleration. This in turn increases the chances of a crash, thereby posing a serious threat to both the vehicle as well as its occupants.
"During initial acceleration from a standstill, or when accelerating again after either constant speed operation or coasting down, affected CVT equipped vehicles may experience a hesitation if the range switch momentarily experiences a loss of signal," the safety recall report revealed.
The issue first came to light following a complaint made by a customer back in January 2016. Subsequent investigations revealed the range switch on the above mentioned vehicles often lost signal, which again was found to be the result of the contact pressure between two terminals located in the switch getting dropped.
It is due to the loss in signal that is leading to the engine torque to drop momentarily, thereby affecting acceleration as well. For drivers, they would find their cars not responding adequately no matter how hard they stepped on the gas.
A total of 82,436 vehicles are affected by the latest recall though as a Mitsubishi spokesman has stated, the issues can be fixed at the software level itself and does not require any hardware changes to be made. All that the dealer will do is reprogram the CVT control unit with new enhanced software. Further, it is just about 30 mins that it would take for the dealers to fix each vehicle.
Mitsubishi though is yet to respond to a query from Edmunds if the recall has been prompted by any crashes or if there have been any incidents of the occupants getting injured and such.
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