Professional skier Nick McNutt was buried in an avalanche in March 2020. While he was under the snow, his Pieps DSP Pro beacon failed to emit a signal, making it impossible for the group searching for him to discover his location using their transceivers. It was only a random strike with an avalanche probe in the slide zone that found him. The incident led him and the skiers he was with that day to question whether the switch on the transceiver had unknowingly toggled between send and search modes a worst-case scenario that McNutt was fortunate to live through.
The athletes worked with Black Diamond (the distributor of the beacons in North America) and Austria-based Pieps to investigate the alleged problem. But in October, frustrated that the two brands hadn’t made a public statement addressing the potential issues in the seven months since the incident,
Revealed: the most recalled cars in Europe in 2020
By Autocar of Autocar |
Cars undergo exhaustive testing.
Despite daunting development budgets, defects in cars still get revealed only after thousands of examples encounter the real world, away from the development tracks and computer simulations.
The EU has an agency called the
Rapid Exchange of Information System, which seeks to flag up safety risks for all products on sale in the EU, including cars. This leads to cars being recalled to have remedial work carried out, almost always at the cost of the original manufacturer, not the consumer.
The website
car-recalls.eu specialises in deciphering the data from the system – and it has just compiled a list of the most recalled car brands in Europe for 2020. Now clearly