Air bag dangers worse in Houston
Dana Swearengin had to wait two weeks for parts to repair her 2006 Honda Civic after it was placed in a nationwide recall. In the interim, she made her sister sit in the back seat whenever they carpooled for fear the front passenger-side air bag might explode.
Jennifer Reitmeyer read news reports about the expanding recall and saw the horrifying injuries long before she received any official notice that her 2010 Honda Pilot needed the repair. Then she fought to get a loaner vehicle during the two months she waited to have her defective inflator replaced.
Serena Martinez never got word and is now suing Honda and air bag manufacturer Takata after being severely injured by a flying piece of red-hot shrapnel in an accident last Sept. 11.
“Air bags are supposed to protect and save lives,” Martinez said last week.
At least 11 deaths and more than 150 injuries have been linked — so far — to the recalled air bags with ammonium nitrate, and Houston is emerging as an area of special concern. The air bags tend to degrade more rapidly in hot, humid climates, and the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says the city has one of the lowest repair rates in such environments.
Honda has been aggressively trying to get the word out and says it has worked to solve a supply problem and is now able to fix cars much more expediently. Yet an estimated 300,000 of its most at-risk models — certain 2001 to 2003 Hondas and Acuras with a 50 percent rupture rate in very humid areas and the cars with the highest fatality rate — still need to be replaced.
The unease is spreading as co-workers swap stories about recall letters, waiting lists and the warning many of them received to not let passengers ride up front.
Wes Ball, a Houston lawyer who has handled injury cases related to the air bags, said automakers haven’t done enough to prevent injuries. Instead, he said, they seem more inclined to pay off lawsuits.
“It’s corporate greed at its finest.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says about 70 million inflators ultimately will need to be replaced in the U.S. by the end of 2019, making this the largest recall in the industry’s history. The repairs are made at no charge to the consumer, but the price tag for Takata is huge. The company has been fined $70 million in civil penalties, and replacing the faulty inflators can cost up to $1,000 apiece.
Richard Dasher, director of Stanford University’s U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center, said that even if car manufacturers don’t want to rely on Takata for replacement inflators, the company controls 20 percent of the world market. That is putting a strain on others to produce replacements in a timely manner, Dasher said.
The scope of the recall and the challenge of alerting so many consumers, including those who own used cars, has put much of the responsibility on vehicle owners. They are urged to run vehicle identification numbers, or VINs, through websites such as safercar. gov to see if their cars are affected. Laws allow used cars to be sold even if they are under recall.
Heeding instructions from the federal highway safety agency, Reitmeyer took her Pilot to Sterling McCall Honda in July. Attendants there said they wouldn’t have the necessary replacement parts ready until late summer or early fall, she said. With relatives coming to visit, she asked for a rental car and was told she hadn’t proved a need to use all the seats in the car.
“Can you believe that?” she said. “Why would I buy a car without a front passenger seat?”
While some dealerships have offered rental cars to consumers waiting for a repair, there is no legal requirement to do so. And where there’s a passenger air bag problem, dealerships are allowed, by law, to tell owners of certain models that it is OK to continue driving the vehicle.
At Sterling McCall Honda, service director Daryl Tucker said he couldn’t address Reitmeyer’s case, but he said the dealership was directed by Honda’s corporate office to provide a contact number to customers waiting on passenger-side air bag parts who wanted a rental vehicle.
Tucker also said the supply problem at the dealership largely has been resolved in recent weeks and that customers now can get an air bag replaced within 24 hours.
Other vehicle owners say they are still waiting. Greg Hill of Sugar Land, for instance, said he has been waiting since March for the replacement parts for the driver-side air bag in his 2014 Acura TL. He said he’s “playing the bet” that his car will be fine in the meantime.
Honda spokesman Chris Martin said by email that the company has been proactive on all recall and repair issues. He urged vehicle owners to consult online recall sites or their local dealerships.
In a news release earlier this year, Takata chairman and CEO Shigehisa Takada said his company is cooperating fully with the U.S. recalls.
“We will continue to dedicate significant resources to maximize recall completion rates, including through our ‘Get the word out’ campaign and by working closely with NHTSA and our automaker customers on new and innovative solutions to reach consumers,” he said.
Earlier this year, Takada told investors he would resign.
Bryan Thomas, a spokesman for the NHTSA, said older vehicles in the recall are of greatest concern because those inflators are more likely to trigger a hazard when they deploy. The inflators in question have propellants with ammonium nitrate, which can become unstable with exposure to moisture.
Water can enter, heat up and cool down repeatedly to the point that pressure builds in the airbag, and it deploys with more force than needed, thus turning the metal around the bag into shrapnel, he said.
Martinez, 42, was driving a 2002 Honda Accord to work, not far from her home in Cinco Ranch, when it was struck on the front passenger side. Her $1 million lawsuit, filed last week, alleges shrapnel from the air bag lacerated her chest and arm, requiring sutures and eventually will mean plastic surgery. Had the shrapnel struck 3 inches in a different direction, it could have severed an artery.
Her attorney, Mo Aziz, called the national recall “ineffective,” citing the backlog of replacement parts. Even if the family had taken the car in for repairs, the necessary parts may not have been available to fix it before the crash, he said during a news conference to announce the lawsuit.
Earlier this year, Aziz represented the family of a Fort Bend County teenager who died after an accident in which her air bag sent shrapnel into her neck. The March 31 fender-bender involved a 2002 Honda Civic. The family’s lawsuit against Honda and Takata was resolved, but Aziz declined to elaborate.
Thomas, of the NHTSA, said Houston is now a focal point for an on-the-ground awareness campaign. He said most notices so far have been offered only in English and on occasion in Spanish, but the new effort will include multiple languages.
The recall will last until Dec. 31, 2019, and includes both driver- and passenger-side air bag inflators, as well as inflators used for temporary fixes. In some cases, due to a supply shortage, dealerships have been installing “like for like” inflators. These interim inflators are also at risk of rupture, but since they have not yet degraded, they are plausibly safer.
Due to the supply constraints, the recall will be rolled out in phases up to 2019, with priority given to states categorized at higher risk due to higher humidity and to older models within these states. Texas falls into the first phase.
Thomas also noted that some 2016 models from some manufacturers have ammonium nitrate inflators and will have to be recalled in two to three years. Dealerships are not cur- rently required to inform consumers about it.
Martin said no 2016 or later Honda or Acura vehicles will be subject to future Takata air bag recalls.
Dasher, of Stanford, said Takata acquired a large share of the market by manufacturing air bags with ammonium nitrate at a tenth of the cost of the compound it previously used. Several automakers relied on the company for air bags for about 15 years, even after the first reports of fatalities, he said.
In a September news release, Takata acknowledged lapses in testing and reporting of the original ammonium nitrate inflators but said those lapses did not correlate with the ruptures that led to the recalls.
By the time the federal government started formally investigating in 2014, Honda had already come under fire for not issuing a recall sooner. Honda became aware of a Takata airbag rupture in 2004.
Martin said Takata classified that incident as an anomaly and that Honda acted appropriately with subsequent rupture cases and ordered a series of recalls for air bags starting in 2008. At the time, he said, it was considered a limited manufacturing issue, not a design flaw.
Jim Perdue Jr., a Houston lawyer, has seen a steady number of cases over the Takata air bags in recent years.
And the pace is likely to continue, he said, given the long wait for repairs.