NHTSA complaint #11698565

Owner complaint summary

My Subaru has an auto start/stop. I was at a complete stop, making a left-hand turn, and my car completely shuts off with the following message: For safety, auto restart disabled; eyesight with a \ through the words, put car in park and restart vehicle. In the time it took me to put the car in park and restart, I was almost T-bone. This was terrifying. This had happened on previous occasion in stop and go traffic which is dangerous because my car has come to a complete stop without any warning to me where the driver behind me There are no warning symbols, warning lights, or any type of signal or symptoms to notify me that my car was going to stop completely.. Typically I remove my foot from the break, the car starts and then I put my foot on the gas pedal and the car moves forward. In the situations described above the car just stopped.It just flat out stopped. There’s never been any indication or signal to indicate the car is not going to restart The retailer replaced my battery and said it should help. I called the Subaru factory rep who was of no help. She said she is not a trained technician and all that she could offer to do was to contact the retailer. The dealer was not able to reproduce the problem. The retailer replaced the battery without any response about the safety issue. I asked if Subaru had a safety board I could report this too and the factory rep said no, but she will document it and they’ll do an internal review to see if we have any other similar issues reported, however, they will not contact me because they don’t talk to the public about these issues. I told her there are hundreds of these if not, thousands concerns online stating the same issue. The rep said she would document my concern. Documentation is good if there’s a fix but I’m concerned about the unnecessary death of a driver.The retailer also advised I could do the auto start override, I’m trying to make a point of how serious of a safety issue this problem can be. Thank you!