That car you drive could be a ticking time bomb -- and you might not find out it's got a serious problem until it's too late.
That's because you live in Tennessee.
Why should that matter?
NewsChannel 5 Investigates found while Tennessee drivers get some vehicle safety recalls, we are not notified about all of them.
Viann Lollar was driving home from work when she heard a loud pop and suddenly couldn't control her car.
She thought she was going to crash.
"I was really scared," she recalled.
An 18-inch piece of corroded metal that snapped in two is what caused that loud pop.
Viann's husband, Ron, said it was the rear suspension control arm from Viann's Jeep Liberty.
But it wasn't until he was looking up repairs online that he discovered the part had been recalled by Chrysler.
According to the recall notice, it can corrode and break without warning, causing a loss of vehicle control, which the auto manufacturer warned can lead to a crash.
"Do you think you should have known about this recall? NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked.
"Oh yeah!" Ron Lollar replied emphatically.
But the Lollars never got a recall notice.
It turns out, Chrysler only sent them to Jeep owners in 20 states -- and Tennessee wasn't one of them.
It was what's known in the auto industry as a regional recall.
These sorts of recalls most often have something to do with some sort of weather condition, generally snow and ice.
But we found that if you own a car in Tennessee, you are missing out on a lot of these recalls because cars here are generally not covered by them so vehicle owners are never warned about these potential problems.
According to Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center For Auto Safety, "People are being killed and injured by defects in states that are not covered."
Ditlow, an auto safety watchdog in Washington, DC, believes that, in the interest of safety, every recall should be a national recall.
But automakers, he says, prefer regional or limited recalls because it saves them money.
"The bottom line is they're putting profits over safety. And what that means is, let the consumer who doesn't get a recall deal with the defect," Ditlow stated.
Remember those exploding Takata airbags?
They started out as a regional recall in only a small handful of states.
It wasn't until after people in other states started getting seriously hurt, and even killed by them, that the recall was finally expanded to cover nearly 70 million vehicles across the country.
"That's wrong. And not only wrong, it's horrible. People should not die from defects just to save the auto companies the cost of doing a national recall," Ditlow told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
He blames the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency that oversees vehicle recalls. He said NHTSA has gotten too cozy with the auto industry and lets automakers get away too often with limiting the size and scope of their recalls.
And while we found quite a few reports of these regional recalls, NHTSA told us they couldn't tell us exactly how many there have been because they don't track that sort of thing.
What we do know is that most regional recalls are for problems caused by corrosion.
Automakers maintain the corrosion is caused by road salt.
"As far as I know, everyone around here uses salt," said Greg Brown, the city of Cookeville's public works director.
And while many Tennessee communities, including the Lollars' hometown of Cookeville, typically go through an entire barn of salt every winter, NHTSA does not consider Tennessee a so-called "salt state," so those regional recalls for corrosion related problems don't apply to vehicles here.
"Are you surprised we're not a salt state?" NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked Cookeville's Brown.
"Yes, I am. You would think we would be," he replied.
Viann Lollar insisted, "We're not in a salt state, but it still happened to us."
And she believes if she'd been going any faster when the suspension arm broke, she or someone else could have been seriously hurt or worse.
"If I'd a lost control on the interstate, we never would have found out what really happened," Lollar tearfully remarked.
The Lollars now wonder how many others in Tennessee are driving cars with defective parts and why NHTSA isn't doing more to protect drivers and their passengers here.
Ron Lollar added, "It's just stupid. They need to do something about it before somebody dies."
Automakers are supposed to pay for repairs, even for vehicles in the so-called salt states.
But the Lollars say Chrysler has repeatedly refused to pay to fix Viann's car because she lives in Tennessee.
Late Monday afternoon, NHTSA said that's not supposed to happen. They said they'd look into this.
But they couldn't say whether Chrysler would face any sort of penalty.
To find out whether there are any recalls on your car, click here.
