February’s car market: sales are increased, but are complaints as well?

According to the latest data from the China Passenger Federation, retail sales of the narrow passenger car market were 1.389 million units in February this year, an increase of 10.3% year on year, with the sales of cars was 656,000 units, an increase of 9% year on year and 7.7% month on month, indicating a better trend.

But the rise in car sales has been accompanied by an increase in complaints. According to Car Quality Network’s most recent data, the platform received 10,026 valid complaints from car owners in February of this year, setting a record for the same month in history. Among them, 5,409 complaints were related to cars, a 40% year-on-year increase.

The most common complaint was a “cracked dashboard,” while “broken sales promises” were another rising complaint, up 36.6 percent from January, similar to previous complaints about “inconsistent with the publicity”.

In particular, most models in the Top 30’s car sales’ complaints list in February 2023 showed a trend of rising complaints, with the BMW 5 Series seeing the greatest increase, with the number of complaints increasing from 74 in January to 113 in February. However, the contents of BMW 5 Series complaints remain “inconsistent with the publicity,” “engine oil leakage,” and other old issues.

Among them, the complaint is inconsistent with the publicity because some people reflect that the function described by the ID7 system carried by the car is very different from the publicity, and the users are described as follows:

“More than 850 of us filed a complaint with BMW China, alleging that the vehicle systems of the 2020 BMW 5 Series, 630, and 2020-2021 X3 and X4 models lacked the remote upgrade and voice control functions described in the user’s manual, and that the defects were deliberately concealed when selling the vehicles, which is in violation of the Protection Law. BMW officials and dealers avoid taking responsibility for each other. Many media outlets have weighed in on this issue, but BMW has yet to offer a solution. They are still avoiding responsibility, refusing to acknowledge that it advertised this function and delegated responsibility to dealers.”

In terms of oil leakage, the main issue expressed by users is that engine burning oil causes severe cylinder carbon deposition. According to the owner’s description, in the case of no intense driving and less than 10,000 kilometers of the first protection, one cylinder spark plug began to appear black oil, and one cylinder carbon accumulation.

This problem not only appears in the BMW 5 Series, but also in the BMW 3 series. If we go further back, we can discover that there were several situations of BMW burning oil released on the Internet as early as last March. It is believed that these issues, which involved models like the BMW 3 series, 5 series, X3, X4, X5, and others, and there are many owners of joint rights, caused uproar on the Internet.

Of course, in addition to BMW, FAW Toyota’s popular model Corolla received 58 complaints in February, with the main issues being “cracked instrument panel, aging components,” and so on. It can be seen that, while the Japanese brand is stable and reliable in the three major components, there is still room for improvement in the interior workmanship and material quality.