Leading American manufacturer of GPS devices Garmin has recalled 1.25 million GPS-navigation units, of which 796 thousand devices were sold in the American market only. The company says that the reason for such action is the overheating of batteries in these devices which can lead to fire.
The company has decided to withdraw the navigation units from the series Garmin Nuvi – 200W, 250W, 260W, and also from series 7хх and 7ххT.
Experts from the company took this radical decision after 10 cases of overheating were reported. Though, none of the reported overheating caused any serious damage.
Presumably, the third party manufacturer of batteries is going to bear the partial cost of recall. Therefore the company is quite optimistic about its financial forecasts as this recall is not going to have mush effect on its balance sheet.
But there are other views also. “This doesn’t appear to be Garmin’s fault, and supplier problems seem to be happening to everyone during these tight times,” said Rob Enderle from Enderle Group. He goes on to add. “Garmin’s bigger issue is that people just aren’t buying personal GPS systems that much anymore because in-car GPSes are provided as a default; cellphone GPSes are becoming vastly easier to use and more common, and the old GPS systems seem to work well for extended periods so people aren’t replacing them.”
The company has released instructions for its customers to check if their devices fall in the category of defective ones. For this purpose, the company has started a dedicated page with instructions on its website and opened a special tech support centre to meet the current crisis. Garmin has requested its customers not to replace the batteries by themselves.
