NHTSA Complaint #11603563 — 2016 SUBARU OUTBACK

Recently, My daughter noticed the strong smell of exhaust in the car. It turns out the there is a leak in the exhaust manifold. Subaru issued SERVICE PROGRAM BULLETIN WUJ-95R to address a issue where a bellows in the exhaust cracked and allowed the leakage of exhaust gases in front of the CC, releasing noxious gases into the air and into the driver compartment. Problem is they only applied this to a small amount of the production of the 2016 outback. This issue has been occurring on 2015 to 2019 models since and they did not include them in the recall. To fix this issue because of a design flaw the CC (Catalytic Converter) also needs to be replaced at a cost of over 3000 dollars. My ask is that they should extend this recall to cover all the cars with this design as it is a serious health issue to drivers of the cars. This is not an issue where rust is causing exhaust to break out, This is a manufacturing design issue where cars are having the issue which were only a couple years old. In my case, the Bellows in question were replaced by the previous owner at less than 4 years old and I did not know about that. So when that repair failed(not the permanent fix offered in the service bulletin) Subaru told me I am on my own though the CC should be covered to 150K in New York State. I feel they should be responsible to address this issue for all the models with the defective design.