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When John Fawcett and his wife, Sandra, learned that they were pregnant, he got down to work. He had never owned a car before. In Iqaluit, Nunavut, where the Newfoundland transplant had lived for 12 years, and where a cab any which way costs $7 per trip, owning a car never seemed essential.

But now the 33-year-old was going to be a father.

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Fawcett settled on a red 2014 Jeep Cherokee with about 22,000 km on it, and went to the bank to negotiate a $22,000 loan to pay for it. The car was serviced. It was clean, and its new owner was thrilled, until mid-August, when the four-wheel drive with the grey interior abruptly shifted into neutral while he was driving home from work.

Photo by Courtesy John Fawcett

“This was my first car,” he says.

Fawcett pulled over and later had the jeep towed to a local mechanic where the diagnosis was the garage didn’t have the correct equipment to make a diagnosis. Fawcett took to the internet, a search that revealed the nice red jeep he had bought with his wife and child in mind was under a manufacturer’s recall for four different issues, including what Transport Canada describes on its website as “an unexpected shift to neutral which could result in a loss of motive power, which in conjunction with traffic and road conditions, and the driver’s reactions may increase the risk of a crash.”