China Attacks Aston Martin Over Recall Involving Chinese Supplier

State-controlled media in China complain that Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. "passed the buck" in blaming a recall to fix a defective part on the component's Chinese supplier.

The official Xinhua news agency says Aston Martin is at fault for failing to manage its own supply chain. The service huffs that the British supercar maker evoked an "unjust stereotype of Made in China' as cheap and copycat."

Last week Aston Martin recalled 17,600 cars 75% of its entire production over the past six years to replace an accelerator pedal arm made with counterfeit plastic that could break.

Regulatory filings in the U.S. show Aston Martin bought throttle pedal assemblies from a British supplier (Precision Varionic International Ltd.), which got the pedal arms from a Hong Kong company (Fast Forward Tooling Ltd.), which got them from a Chinese molder (Shenzhen Kexiang Mould Tool Co.), which made them using counterfeit plastic supplied by a Chinese raw material provider (Synthetic Plastic Raw Material Co.).

Reuters reports that Fast Forward's registered address is the office of a legal and secretarial service.

China's People's Daily says the fourth-tier plastics supplier does not have a business registry. But it concludes that Aston Martin's management "has unavoidable responsibility for the problem."