Honda to expand recalls of driver-side Takata airbags

December 03, 2014 12:00 AM

Reuters

Rick Schostek: Honda will give drivers free loaner cars until repairs can be made. “It is unfortunate and, yes, inexcusable,”

Honda North America today said it would expand its recall of potentially explosive driver-side airbag inflators nationwide in accordance with a request from federal regulators, even as the airbag manufacturer Takata Corp. continued to insist it’s not necessary.

Honda also will give drivers free loaner cars until repairs can be made, Rick Schostek, an executive vice president with the automaker, told a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Due to limited availability of replacement parts, Schostek said Honda will prioritize vehicles in the high-humidity areas of the U.S. that were previously recalled. He said Honda is working with two other airbag manufacturers, Autoliv and Daicel, to accelerate production of new inflators.

In a statement, Autoliv confirmed it will build more inflators for Honda.

“In the current difficult situation with a very high level of field actions and recalls in the market we are doing our utmost to support our customers," Autoliv CEO Jan Carlson said in the statement. "With quality as our first priority we are assessing the current and upcoming market needs in order to match our delivery capabilities in the best possible way."

Autoliv, the Swedish automotive safety products supplier, said it will build additional capacity at existing plans. Deliveries are expected to begin in about six months, the company said in the statement.

Takata's suspect inflators can spray metal at vehicle occupants in a crash. Takata has refused the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s demand to recall the driver-side inflators. NHTSA had given Takata until Tuesday to expand the recall nationally.

“The data still supports that we should remain focused on the region with high temperature and high humidity,” Hiroshi Shimizu, Takata’s senior vice president for global quality assurance, told the House subcommittee today. Shimizu again apologized for the deaths and injuries that have been linked to Takata airbags and asserted that the inflators it is currently producing are safe.

Honda’s expansion does not affect passenger-side airbags, which account for a majority of the faulty inflators.

True cause?

The driver-side recall, originally announced in June, is being expanded even though no one -- neither Takata nor Honda nor NHTSA -- has conclusively determined the true cause of the problem. NHTSA last month called for a national recall after discovering that some driver-side airbags had ruptured outside the high-humidity region.

“While we accept regional recalls where the evidence supports it, the evidence no longer supports a recall limited to those areas,” NHTSA’s deputy administrator, David Friedman, told the panel.

Friedman said NHTSA could call a hearing to compel Takata to issue a recall but said it will take some time to build the case it would need to do so.

“It could be weeks, it could be months, but it certainly won’t be many months,” Friedman said.

In addition, NHTSA has been working with the Department of Justice on the Takata issue since September, Friedman said.

Honda penalty

Friedman said NHTSA also is deciding how to respond to Honda’s recent admission that it neglected to report 1,729 potentially defect-related crashes involving deaths and injuries over the past decade.

Honda could be fined as much as $35 million for the failures, which it attributed to data-entry and computer-coding errors. A small number of the crashes related to Takata airbag ruptures.

“They’ve already basically admitted their guilt,” Friedman said. “We will hold them accountable to the full extent of the law.”

Friedman called on other automakers to audit their crash-report filings to ensure they have not made similar omissions.

Schostek acknowledged that the scope of Honda’s failure is “difficult to comprehend” but said it was not intentional.

“It is unfortunate and, yes, inexcusable,” he said. “But we view this as a management responsibility, and we are taking actions to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”