Airbag recall over threat of explosion
Owners of 50,000 vehicles who don’t get repairs face penalties including failed WoF
Drivers who don’t get faulty airbags fixed as part of a compulsory recall of 50,000 vehicles could be failed when they take their cars for a warrant of fitness.
Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi announced the recall yesterday afternoon.
Vehicle owners can find out if their cars are affected on the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s recalls.govt.nz website and a dedicated website detailing all affected cars will be running within days.
The 50,000 vehicles are equipped with Alpha-type Takata airbags, an older model that could deploy unexpectedly, spraying passengers with shrapnel.
It is only the second compulsory recall in New Zealand history, and the largest vehicle recall by far.
A further 257,000 vehicles containing non-Alpha airbags are subject to a voluntary recall.
Faafoi said he would stop the import of vehicles whose airbags had not been fixed. After a grace period of 40 working days, no new or used affected vehicles would be allowed into the country.
All Alpha-type airbags must be replaced by December 2019. The compulsory recall comes into effect 40 working days from yesterday.
Motor Industry Association chief executive David Crawford said that for New Zealand-new vehicles the target was “very achievable” because the numbers were smaller “but for used imported vehicles there’s about 45,000, it’s going to be tight but the distributors tell me that they expect that they should be able to achieve it within 18 months”.
“That’s totally dependent on the owner of the vehicles responding to the letters and bringing the vehicles in because that’s still the discretionary part,” he added.
The mandatory recall put a number of measures in place that were not available when it was voluntary “and one of those is that we will write three or four letters depending on conversations with the NZTA and then the NZTA will write either the fourth or fifth letter and then after that if the owner still hasn’t brought the vehicle in, the NZTA letter will flag that it may not pass its next warrant.”
The Alpha-type airbag, which was part of the mandatory recall, “that’s the one that’s been worrying us for some time”, Crawford said.
“We’ve been managing this on a voluntary basis for about four years and we’re only about 35 per cent of the way through when you put combined new and used vehicles together.”
It could take 30 minutes to two hours to fit a replacement airbag, depending on the model.
“At last count, when you take all Takata airbags [which] is now 450,000, only about 130,000 have been done and there’s over 100 million worldwide so getting these parts made model-make specific is a
HKeep up with the latest on this story at nzherald.co.nz What is the issue? Airbags manufactured by the Japanese company Takata are potentially defective. The gas inside the airbag inflator can be affected by moisture which can cause it to deploy with explosive force, sending metal shards from the canister flying into the passenger cabin. The risk of failure is higher in hot and humid conditions. Not all Takata airbags will explode on deployment – about one in 400 is at risk. Tests on older Alpha-type airbags show up to half could explode on deployment. logistics challenge”
Morgan Dilks, digital marketing and communications, Toyota New Zealand, said just over 26,000 Toyota vehicles were included in the 50,000 recall.
“We’ve already sent letters to 99 per cent of them, some customers we’ve sent up to three letters, so the remaining 1 per cent will receive Who’s affected Compulsory recall of 50,417 vehicles of various models fitted with Takata Alpha-type airbags Voluntary recall of 256,986 vehicles of various models fitted with Takata non Alpha-type airbags What should you do? Check to see if your vehicle has been recalled. You can look for NZ-new models at recalls.govt.nz/airbags or find a list of used-import models recalled in Japan at rightcar.govt.nz/airbagrecall. The lists are always being updated, as more makes and models are implicated, so keep checking. letters by the end of this month. We are definitely supportive of what the Government has announced because we’re hoping to encourage people to act a bit more urgently.”
A voluntary recall of vehicles with affected Takata airbags began in 2013 but Faafoi said not enough progress was being made to repair them.
He has set up a monitoring group to ensure non-Alpha airbag recalls were progressing and said he would make that compulsory too if it wasn’t.
Australia issued a compulsory recall in late February, covering about four million vehicles — one in seven.
The Takata airbags, mostly made in Japan, have been associated with 23 deaths and 230 serious injuries worldwide since 2008.