Honda Motor Company disclosed this week that it failed to report 1729 injuries or deaths to the National Highway Site visitors Safety Administration as needed by law. The unreported incidents, which occurred among 2003 and 2014, vastly outweigh the about 900 injuries or deaths the company did report during that time.
The New York Instances reports that this week’s revelation comes soon after an outside law firm audited Honda’s reporting procedures at the carmaker’s request. The situation of underreporting injuries and deaths was 1st identified by a Honda employee in 2011, the Times reports. “Apparently, there was no stick to-up,” Honda stated in a statement.
The necessary reports are element of Early Warning Reporting, a system that demands carmakers to report to NHTSA any injuries or deaths blamed on car defects. The system was established in 2000 in response to rollover crashes blamed on Ford Explorers wearing Firestone tires.
Rick Schostek, executive vice president of Honda North America, blamed the missing reports on “inadvertent data entry and laptop programming errors,” noting that injury and death claims entered with no a date were omitted from incident reports. Not everyone buys that explanation: Allan J. Kam, a former NHTSA lawyer now functioning as an auto-safety consultant, told The New York Occasions, “this is not an occasional error this is systematic underreporting by the organization.”
The admission could open Honda to federal penalties up to $ 35 million, the fine Basic Motors received for failure to disclose defective ignition switches in a timely manner, although lawmakers are now considering raising the maximum fine considerably. Ferrari was slapped with a $ 3.5-million fine this month for failing to submit the very same Early Warning Reports that Honda neglected to file, though in Ferrari’s case the missing reports concerned only 3 fatal accidents.
Honda’s underreporting came to light in the course of a separate investigation into faulty Takata airbags, which Honda has linked to 5 deaths and dozens of injuries, The New York Instances reports. Eight of Honda’s missing claims, including a single fatality, had to do with defective Takata airbags, which can deploy with excessive force and fire shrapnel at drivers and passengers in an accident. The automaker finds itself in increasingly hot water over Takata airbag problems, which the company reportedly hid from NHTSA for many years prior to recall activity.
Honda says it has fixed the pc troubles that led to the underreporting and is retraining its workers and updating the departments responsible for Early Warning Reporting.
Honda Hid Practically 1800 Injuries and Deaths From NHTSA For Much more Than a Decade
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