A TAUNTON couple have been at the heart of a campaign which has seen a recall of 234,000 Vauxhall Zafiras after helping expose a design fault which caused hundreds of the cars to catch fire.

Jo and Dan Hunt got involved in the campaign after it appeared on BBC's Watchdog programme, and have gone on to garner national media coverage for their efforts in helping understand what was causing the fires.

"The campaign was initially started by a lady called Sue Freemantle from Ivybridge after her Zafira caught fire," Jo explained.

"Her family had got back in from a day out, parked the car on the drive and taken the keys out of the ignition when they noticed smoke coming from the air vents of the car.

"They rang the fire brigade who arrived within eight minutes, by which time the car had gone completely up in flames."

A report about Sue's car fire appeared in her local paper and Claire Wheatley got in touch with Sue to say a similar thing had happened with her Zafira.

The two women contacted Vauxhall and asked what the company were going to do about it, but were told it was an 'isolated thermal incident' and they would need to claim through their insurance.

After doing some further research Sue and Claire decided to set up a Facebook group called Vauxhall Zafira Car Fires - within a week it had 1,000 members and within a couple of months they knew of 180 car fires.

The issue appeared on BBC's Watchdog and that is when Jo and Dan became aware of the issue.

"At the time we were just about to sell out Zafira to my best friend, but once we heard how dangerous the cars were we obviously decided not to proceed," Jo said.

Dan is an electrical engineer by trade, and being the 'inquisitive type', decided to run some tests on their Zafira and soon concluded that the fault could not be down to people getting 'improper' repairs, as Vauxhall were saying when it initially recalled the cars in December.

He teamed up with a member of the Facebook group, electrical faults expert Dr Gareth Thomas, who had independently come to the same conclusion as Dan that the fires were being caused by a design fault.

"By this point we were admins on the Facebook page, which had grown to more than 14,000 members. We decided to try and crowd fund money for an independent investigation," Jo said.

"We raised nearly half the £10,000 required, fortunately, we were getting further media coverage and The Sun newspaper agreed to stump up the rest of the cash."

The report also concluded that there was a design fault with the heater, and this has led Vauxhall to issue a second recall of 234,000 Zafira B models made between 2005 and 2014.

"They are generally good family cars available at a reasonable price, that is why there are so many of them about!" Jo said.

On Monday firefighters in The Isle of Wight were called to smoking Zafira, and on May 15 two children were pulled from another Zafira moments before it burst into flames in Llanelli, South Wales.

"It has taken over our lives a bit," Jo said. "The next step is to look into legal action. We are keen to hear from anyone in the local area who has experienced a similar problem with their Zafira."

For more information go to the Vauxhall Zafira Car Fires Facebook page.