At a news conference Sept. 17, Iranian Health Minister Hassan Ghazizadeh Hashemi weighed in on the controversy over domestically made cars, asking rhetorically, “Can we put substandard cars on the road and not expect accidents?” He said, “However much we equip hospitals, if we do not spend time on other issues such as observing standards for car production, we will not get results. We’ve been building cars for 36 years but we still are far from reaching the point where we ideally need to be.”

It might seem odd for the health minister of a country to be asked about the production of domestically made cars, but in Iran the issue has been a hot topic for the past month. Approximately 20,000 Iranians die from car accidents every year, one of the highest rates in the world. And accusations that Iranian cars are made at a substandard level sparked a social media campaign to boycott Iranian-made cars.

The car industry is important to Iran's economy. As Farahmand Alipour reported for Al-Monitor, Iran’s auto industry is “the country’s second-largest industry in Iran after oil” and employs approximately 700,000 factory workers. Iran is the largest car producer in the Middle East and, before sanctions, was the 11th-biggest car producer in the world.

Mohammad Shariatmadari, President Hassan Rouhani’s vice president for executive affairs, conceded that Iranian customers were purchasing an expensive car of lower quality. He said Sept. 16, “People sometimes purchase a domestically produced [car] at a higher price with a slightly lower quality than a foreign [car]. Our people have participated in another jihad, which is the support of domestic products. And we have to protect this spirit and provide conditions so that in the not-so-distant future, the quality of Iranian-made products are appropriate and worthy of the Iranian people.”