According to Cama Motors, there is a document where cars of the same series of chassis numbers have had their airbags replaced but such documents are maintained secretly by the company and such operations are carried out selectively by dealers.
It said, in 2007, Manish Patel, who was driving an E class Mercedes in Ahmedabad, lost his life when all three airbags in the front row failed to inflate. Similarly, in November 2011, Nirmal Saraf lost his life when travelling in a Mercedes S class as the airbag failed to open. In this accident only one airbag was inflated, unfortunately it was a vacant seat.
According to Cama Motors, in case of Manish Patel’s death, the company sent one engineer, Lothar Shuzzare from Germany to inspect the car. After repeated attempts, Mr Shuzzare and Mercedes Benz gave some incomprehensible technical data on a single sheet and now the company is saying that the data was destroyed since many years have passed. And yet, the same person was dispatched by the company to inspect the S class vehicle in which Nirmal Saraf died.
While in the first case Mr Shuzzare inspected the E Class of the Patel family at the spot, in the second case he demanded the S class vehicle to be handed over the Daimler AG for a report. “His claim was that the technology of Mercedes Benz is analyzable only by their own people. He even mentioned that the police in Europe also have to come to Daimler for investigating accidents,” Cama Motors said.
It added, “This is the stand of a man who has already submitted a report of airbag performance of our customer’s car with fake data! The truth is that Daimler never releases the full code and knowledge of control unit software so that market ready, freely available and legal scanning machines can fully read and analyse the memories and other devices of the car”.
Cama Motors, along with Vimal Saraf and a representative of the Patel family on 19 April 2012 met the Additional Director General of CCI. However, there is not much progress.