THE top 10 events featuring consumer rights protection voted on by residents online were released by the consumer rights protection joint conference office Tuesday, the Shenzhen Evening News reported yesterday.

Over 25,200 people joined the online vote between March 5 and 8. The office also hosted a review meeting to select the top 10 consumer rights protection events in Shenzhen last year. The online vote accounts for 60 percent of each event’s final score, and the review result accounts for 40 percent.

The top 10 events show the efforts made by the government, agencies and public institutions to protect consumer rights last year.

One of the events was about the in-car air quality problem of the Audi Q5. The Shenzhen Consumer Council tackled the problem by holding a meeting last August, which was attended by representatives from Audi and FAW-Volkswagen as well as car owners, experts and reporters.

The council received 116 complaints about the poor in-car air quality of the Audi Q5 in the first half of last year. Last July, the council invited 20 consumers to join an on-site test to evaluate the in-car air quality of 23 Audi Q5 cars that were produced between June 2013 and October 2016.

The test results showed that 78 percent of consumers could smell a noticeable and unpleasant odor in the cars. All of the 23 cars were found to contain formaldehyde and TVOC, and after being parked for longer than 20 minutes, 21 of the cars showed higher levels of formaldehyde than the national standard for indoor air quality and the German standard for in-car air quality.

One of the car owners, surnamed Wang, said the Audi Q5 car that his family had bought in January 2016 was so smelly that his 4-year-old son would cry almost every time he got in the car.

According to Li Hongze, vice general manager of Audi’s sales department, the rubber soundproofing materials in some Audi Q5 cars would cause an unpleasant odor in high temperatures. He said the company launched an action last June to replace the defective soundproofing materials for car owners for free, and over 2,700 Audi Q5 cars in Shenzhen were rectified.

However, Wang and another car owner, surnamed Chen, weren’t satisfied with Li’s response. According to Chen, her Audi Q5 car was smelly after being parked in an underground garage for a long time, which made her question Li’s excuse that high temperatures were the reason for the odor.

Wang urged the automobile company to proactively contact car owners to find the real source of the problem and solve it, because the council’s test showed that some Audi Q5 cars still contained unacceptably high levels of formaldehyde after their soundproofing materials were replaced.

Yu Xifeng, deputy secretary general of the council, urged the company to recall the Audi Q5 cars with quality problems.

(Zhang Yang)