Luxury sports car maker Aston Martin recently announced a recall of more than 17,000 cars, or roughly 75 percent of the vehicles it's made since 2007, because of counterfeit nylon resin in a throttle pedal arm made in China.
The company told the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that bags of material delivered to its China injection molder were labeled as DuPont nylon 6, but in fact contained non-DuPont nylon 6 as well as nylon 6/6. Aston Martin said it requires DuPont nylon 6 material.
But the recall had a few unusual twists.
The company that Aston Martin said did the molding in Shenzhen denied that it had any role, other than making some samples after it was approached last year by another supplier named in the recall.
As well, the material supplier listed by Aston Martin, at a large plastic market in China, and the Tier Two firm that hired the Shenzhen molder, proved unreachable.
In this video, Plastics News decided to try to document its attempts to unravel the broken supply chain.