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India’s Maruti recalling A-Star on fuel leakage

The recall of the model, which is mainly exported to several countries including Germany, Britain and France, began in November to fix a fuel leakage problem, a spokesman for the company told Reuters on Tuesday.

Shares in the company ended down 3.2 percent at 1,336.85 rupees on Tuesday in a Mumbai market that rose 0.3 percent.

“I think there has been an impact to sentiment considering what is going on globally,” Vaishali Jajoo, an auto-sector analyst at Angel Broking, said.

“Everybody is fearing whether it can spread to other models, but I cannot guess whether that will actually happen,” she said.

Maruti’s move comes as Japanese rival Toyota Motor Corp is embroiled in a much larger recall of 8.5 million vehicles globally in recent months for problems including sticky accelerators and a braking glitch affecting its hybrid models.

The Maruti spokesman said there had been no customer complaints but an internal analysis had shown that when fuel was filled beyond a certain point, there was a possibility of leakage. About 50 percent of the faulty cars have been fixed.

These vehicles belonged to a lot made until Aug. 22 last year, he said.

Between January and December last year, the company exported about 100,000 A-Stars that was first launched in India in late 2008. It sells 3,500 to 4,000 A-stars a month in India.

Jajoo said she had spoken to Maruti and the company had told her the fault was only in the A-Star.

Maruti is on track to hit annual sales of 1 million cars in the current fiscal year that ends in March.