Hiroshi Shimizu, Takata’s senior vice president of global quality assurance, testifies prior to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on December 3. With Takata denying a federal request to recall more of its driver’s-side airbags, Honda has agreed to do so by expanding its regional recalls and calling all automakers to help a third-party audit that would speed up parts testing and properly determine the shrapnel-shooting airbags.
As of last Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had provided Takata till midnight last night to expand the recall and had pressured half of the 10 impacted automakers to do the exact same. Even though NHTSA maintains that passenger-side airbags do not pose a coast-to-coast dilemma, Takata senior vice president Hiroshi Shimizu rebuffed NHTSA’s claims that numerous million driver’s-side airbags now demonstrate a national safety threat.
“Based on the information we are collecting from the area, the data nevertheless support that we need to stay focused on the area with higher humidity,” Shimizu said in a hearing these days to the Residence Committee on Energy and Commerce.
To date, Takata has tested roughly 4000 inflators recovered from automobiles in “high humidity” regions of the south and Gulf Coast and mentioned that all of the about 400 driver’s-side inflators had performed as made. But of the remaining 3600 passenger-side inflators, Shimizu said that “less than 60″ had ruptured—which, at 1.67 percent of the sample, is a really high failure rate in manufacturing. NHTSA had sent a recall request to Takata final month right after a driver of a 2007 Ford Mustang outdoors of the regional recall was injured by a 2-inch metal shard. In the U.S., 4 folks have died from the defective Takata inflators—all of them in Honda vehicles—and at least 139 injuries have been reported across all automakers.
“The proof is the dilemma isn’t restricted to locations of absolute, high humidity,” NHTSA deputy administrator David Friedman mentioned at the hearing. Friedman mentioned he would pursue fines, which can run up to $ 7000 per day, if Takata does not comply with an expanded recall.
So far, only Toyota has seconded Honda’s request for outside testing but did not expand any of its recalls. Takata said it would kind an independent panel to scrutinize top quality checks, advocate very best practices at its facilities, and publish the outcomes at a later date. As element of NHTSA’s investigation, the organization has till December 5 to give the agency with specifics on its manufacturing processes and to reveal employee names who worked on the production line when the faulty airbags had been manufactured. All 10 automakers have also been ordered to submit test results from the regional recalls by December 5, therefore Honda’s cry for a group effort. Honda is under a separate investigation by NHTSA for omitting 1729 death and injury reports for much more than a decade, a dilemma the firm said right now was due to poor employee oversight, and for not specifically mentioning airbag-connected deaths and injuries in previous recalls.
In August, a 2007 Ford Mustang driver was injured by this 2-inch metal fragment from a faulty Takata airbag. Despite months of testing—plus years of related investigations by Takata and Honda that stretch back to 2004—neither Takata nor the automakers have a definitive answer as to why the airbags are exploding shrapnel. Shimizu mentioned Takata is testing about 25 inflators per day and is at the moment on track to ship out 350,000 replacements per month and will ramp up to 450,000 by January. If every single automaker issues national airbag recalls, Takata has agreed to contract with suppliers Autoliv and Daicel to feed the demand.
Even though many of Takata’s present airbag inflators use the synthetic compound Tetrazole, Shimizu stated there was nothing unsafe about the ammonium nitrate utilized in the faulty inflators, only that “manufacturing processes and humidity handle in the plant” had triggered the difficulty. When Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) revealed comments from Takata engineers in 1999 who raised doubts about ammonium nitrate, which includes that it “predisposes this propellant to break apart” and that it could “blow up,” Shimizu stated he did not remember seeing them. Last month, a Takata official said the replacement airbag inflators had a revised chemical compound but have been still based on ammonium nitrate. Shimizu said the replacements have the identical propellant as prior to.
“I’m really confident that items on the present production line ought to operate as created and are protected,” Shimizu said.
With regard to allegations that company workers destroyed information following discovering faulty airbags in 2004, Shimizu denied there was “any secret test” and stated the organization did conduct tests at that time associated to a separate difficulty in which airbag cushions have been tearing on BMW models.
Honda Expands Airbag Recall Nationwide, Takata Tests Show High Defect Rates
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