Hundreds of Iranian-made cars have suddenly caught fire on Iran's roads over the past months, with police pointing to the Peugeot 405 as the main culprit, the press reported yesterday.
Since March, there have been 125 incidents of cars catching fire without warning and then killing or injuring the occupants, traffic police chief Mohammad Rooyanian said.
"Around 300 people have been killed or wounded and 40 per cent of the fatalities were attributed to the Peugeot 405," he said. "We are not to going compromise on this issue. We are emphasizing the need to improve the safety of the vehicles, so that our citizens will not be worried any more."
The Peugeot 405 and other models from the French car maker have been manufactured under licence since 1990 by Iran Khodro, Iran's largest car manufacturer.
"Fire service figures from the first six months of the year have said that 700 cars caught fire in Tehran, out of which 70 per cent of them were manufactured by Iran Khodro," Mr. Rooyanian said.
Iran Khodro's director of marketing, Mehdi Ghasem, said the problem was an "occasional technical fault in the fuel system" in cars more than two years old and emphasized that vehicles made in this Iranian year had no such fault.
"Neither us nor the police have received any report on such a fault in this year's cars. Therefore, the registration process will automatically go on," he said, dismissing warnings of a ban on the car.
The state-owned Iran Khodro company has an annual production of about 550,000 cars.