This article was written by

Follow

Chrysler is recalling more than 1.27 million pickup trucks in the U.S. over a possible seat belt issue that could increase the risk of injury in a crash.

The recall covers 1,271,294 model-year 2019 through 2026 Ram 1500 vehicles. Chrysler estimates that about 0.1% of the recalled vehicles actually have the defect, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

NHTSA said the second-row seat belt buckle anchors may have been improperly installed, leaving the vehicles out of compliance with federal safety requirements.

SOME OLDER FORD VEHICLES POSE ‘UNREASONABLE’ SAFETY RISKS, REGULATORS WARN

A 2019 Ram 1500 Rebel Black Edition pickup truck. Chrysler is recalling more than 1.27 million pickup trucks in the U.S. over a possible seat belt issue. (Stellantis)

“Reduced load management by the seat belt buckle may result in injury to vehicle occupants in certain types of driving conditions or crashes,” the report states.

The recalled trucks were produced between Feb. 17, 2018, and April 27, 2026. 

Production and service records were used to determine the potentially affected vehicles, according to NHTSA.

HONDA RECALLS MORE THAN 880,000 VEHICLES OVER REAR SUSPENSION FAILURE RISK

The grille of a 2019 Ram 1500 Limited pickup truck. The recall covers 1,271,294 model-year 2019 through 2026 Ram 1500 vehicles.  (Stellantis)

NHTSA said the recall stems from a vehicle assembly issue rather than a defective component.

Dealers will inspect the second-row seat belt buckle anchors and, if necessary, properly attach them to the vehicle’s body structure at no cost to owners.

“The remedy will be to ensure that the second-row seat belt buckle anchors are properly affixed to the body structure,” the report states.

JAGUAR LAND ROVER RECALLS MORE THAN 15,000 VEHICLES OVER VISIBILITY-LIMITING DEFECT

A 2019 Ram 1500 Limited pickup truck. The recalled trucks were produced between Feb. 17, 2018, and April 27, 2026.  (Stellantis)

CLICK HERE TO GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO

Dealers were notified on or about Aug. 6, with owner notifications set to begin Aug. 18.

Stellantis, Chrysler’s parent company, could not immediately be reached by FOX Business for comment.

Last Thursday evening I stood in a pub off Brewer Street with a pint in one hand and an elbow on the bar, talking with an old friend that I regularly find myself taking over the media world with.

By the second pint we had solved the skills crisis, where Spurs will finish next season and I’d advised him on his new electric car purchase. The doors were open, the crowd had spilled politely onto the pavement, and for ninety minutes the British economy was doing exactly what it says on the tin.

However, it turns out I was part of the problem. Buried in Westminster City Council’s new draft licensing policy, out for consultation until five o’clock this evening, is a desire for West End venues to swap “open bar space that caters for high volume vertical drinking” for seating, table service and the ordering of food. Vertical drinking, for those who have not kept up with the literature, is standing up with a drink. In a pub.

The council has since insisted there is no plan, and never has been, to ban standing up in a Westminster pub, which is what organisations always say once a consultation catches fire. But the draft statement of licensing policy says what it says, and licensing policies are not mood boards. They are the criteria against which every new licence and variation is judged. If the policy smiles upon seated table service, applicants will promise seated table service, and the West End will get it by increments, one genuflecting application at a time.

Even Downing Street felt moved to intervene, declaring that busy pubs full of people talking to each other are “not a public nuisance, it is British life, and it is thousands of jobs”, while Sadiq Khan complained that you cannot run a world-famous nightlife district with a village-hall mindset. When No 10, the Mayor and every publican in Soho find themselves in furious agreement in the second week of August, something properly daft is afoot.

And we know this particular species of daft, because we lived through it. Cast your mind back to the winter of 2020, when the finest minds in Whitehall convened to determine whether a scotch egg constituted a substantial meal, and honest citizens ordered plates of chips they had no intention of eating in order to drink a pint lawfully. Nobody voted for the substantial meal rule. It seeped out of guidance, and within a fortnight it was the law of the land in everything but statute. Vertical drinking is the scotch egg’s second coming: a rule about furniture pretending to be a policy about safety.

What Westminster is really proposing is to become the aunt with the wedding seating plan. Everyone has met her. She has decided, with laminated certainty, that the day will go better if nobody is permitted to circulate. You will sit here, beside your assigned stranger, and you will have your allocated fun between the starter and the speeches.

And the reception dies on its feet, or rather in its chairs, because everything good at a party happens standing up: the introductions, the gossip, the flirtation, the job offer scribbled on a napkin. The pub is Britain’s reception venue, and Soho is the top table. Sit it down and you kill the mingle.

Business readers will recognise both halves of the disease. The first is capacity economics. A wet-led pub sells space by the square foot, and a drinker standing at the bar occupies perhaps a third of the footprint of one marooned at a table, while being served faster by fewer staff. Mandate seats and you cut Friday night’s capacity by a third and add a waiter’s wages to every round, in a trade where the BBPA already counts two pubs a day calling last orders for good and £1 in every £3 taken over the bar goes to the Treasury before a single bill is paid.

The second is regulatory creep: rules that arrive dressed as “encouragement” in guidance documents, which no minister ever has to defend because no minister ever proposed them.

A fortnight ago in this column I suggested that the nation’s dawdling diners should eat up and give the table back, because a restaurant sells seat hours. A pub is the mirror image. Its product is proximity: strangers, upright, two deep at the bar, in the only institution Britain has ever built for the purpose. With licensed venues already going dark at three a day, the West End’s problem is not that too many people are standing in its pubs. It is that soon there may be nothing left to stand in.

The consultation closes at five o’clock today, and I intend to mark the deadline in the traditional way: upright, elbow on the bar, talking nonsense to a stranger and in this instance I hope that I don’t end up as an extra in TOWIE.

Richard Alvin

Richard Alvin is a serial entrepreneur, a former advisor to the UK Government about small business and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on Business at Lancaster University.

A winner of the London Chamber of Commerce Business Person of the year and Freeman of the City of London for his services to business and charity. Richard is also Group MD of Capital Business Media and SME business research company Trends Research, regarded as one of the UK’s leading experts in the SME sector and an active angel investor and advisor to new start companies.

Richard is also the host of Save Our Business the U.S. based business advice television show.

Advertisement