Takata to double airbag recall in U.S. to 34 million vehicles
With several automakers and a parts shortage, fixing cars could take years
Airbag maker Takata Corp. gave in to U.S. regulators on Tuesday, agreeing to what will be the largest automotive recall in history as investigators continue to search for the root cause of a defect that has killed at least six people.
About 34 million cars are now on a list for an airbag replacement, double the number that had already been recalled. With vehicles from 10 different automakers and a severe shortage of repair parts, it could take years for all of the cars to be made safe, said Mark Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“As far as we know, this is the largest recall in auto history,” Rosekind told a news conference in Washington. “Others are doing research and suggest that it could be one of the largest if not the largest of all consumer recalls.”
As part of a consent order, Tokyobased Takata agreed to make the recall nationwide and submit its parts to the U.S. government for testing. The agreement offers a way for Takata to resolve a global autosafety crisis that made it a target for lawsuits and hurt its standing with the automakers it supplies.
“We are pleased to have reached this agreement with NHTSA, which presents a clear path forward to advancing safety and restoring the trust of automakers and the driving public,” Takata CEO Shigehisa Takada said in a statement.
The company agreed to pay more than $1 million in accrued fines for a failure to co-operate with the investigation. More fines are possible.
The case involves airbag inflators that may deploy with too much force, breaking apart and sending shards of metal and plastic into the passenger compartment of vehicles. Takata, its automaker customers and U.S. regulators have had trouble getting to the root cause of the problem, and millions of customers are still unable to get their cars fixed because of a shortage of replacement parts.
“Takata should have been much more aggressive before now in protecting passengers through a national recall,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal. “In the meantime, the Department of Justice should be taking appropriate action to investigate and impose penalties.”
NHTSA has been pressuring Honda Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. and eight other automakers affected by the recalls to speed the repair process and work with other airbag suppliers to obtain parts. The agency has also demanded that Tokyo-based Takata turn over more documents and data from the devices that have been removed from the recalled cars.
NHTSA in February began fining Takata $14,000 a day for not completely answering questions about airbag inflater production and company efforts to investigate the explosions. It said at the time that most of the 2.4 million pages of documents the company had produced didn’t actually relate to the agency’s specific inquiries.
The agency become more aggressive since it was lambasted by Con- gress for failing to be more active prior to last year’s revelation that about 2.6 million General Motors cars had a known ignition-switch defect that went unrecalled for years.
“NHTSA has done a 180-degree turn on how they’re handling these safety investigations,” Kevin Dean, who represents plaintiffs in several airbag lawsuits, said, praising the agency. The recalls still may not go far enough, he said.
Modern airbags, credited by NHTSA with saving more than 2,000 lives per year in the U.S., rely on small chemical reactions to safely inflate in milliseconds when sensors detect a crash. Takata’s trouble has been linked by safety advocates and victims’ lawyers to the company’s choice of chemical propellant, a type of ammonium nitrate that can be rendered unstable by high humidity and moisture.
In a properly operating device, gas created by an electrical charge is released through holes in a metal canister to inflate the airbag. If the chemical propellant tablets are made improperly or have degraded because of moisture, they vaporize with too much pressure, potentially resulting in a burst canister that hurls metal and plastic shards through the airbag.
“All of us have to do fact-checking to make sure they’re getting every vehicle with ammonium nitrate-based inflators, because they’re subject to deterioration over time,” Dean said.
Other affected customers in the U.S. market are units of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, Toyota Motor Corp., Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Mazda Motor Corp., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co., Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd.’s Subaru and Mitsubishi Motors Corp.