Hiroshi Shimizu, Takata’s senior vice president of global good quality assurance, testifies ahead of 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 components testing and properly determine the shrapnel-shooting airbags.
As of last Wednesday, the National Highway Visitors Safety Administration had provided Takata until midnight last evening to expand the recall and had pressured half of the 10 impacted automakers to do the same. While NHTSA maintains that passenger-side airbags do not pose a coast-to-coast problem, Takata senior vice president Hiroshi Shimizu rebuffed NHTSA’s claims that a number of million driver’s-side airbags now demonstrate a national safety danger.
“Based on the information we are collecting from the region, the data nonetheless help that we must remain focused on the region with higher humidity,” Shimizu stated in a hearing today 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 said that all of the approximately 400 driver’s-side inflators had performed as designed. But of the remaining 3600 passenger-side inflators, Shimizu said that “less than 60″ had ruptured—which, at 1.67 % of the sample, is a quite higher failure price in manufacturing. NHTSA had sent a recall request to Takata final month soon 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 limited to areas of absolute, higher humidity,” NHTSA deputy administrator David Friedman stated 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 outdoors testing but did not expand any of its recalls. Takata stated it would type an independent panel to scrutinize top quality checks, recommend greatest practices at its facilities, and publish the final results at a later date. As part of NHTSA’s investigation, the company has till December 5 to supply the agency with particulars 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 benefits from the regional recalls by December 5, hence Honda’s cry for a group work. Honda is below a separate investigation by NHTSA for omitting 1729 death and injury reports for far more than a decade, a dilemma the business mentioned nowadays was due to poor employee oversight, and for not specifically mentioning airbag-related 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 said Takata is testing about 25 inflators per day and is currently on track to ship out 350,000 replacements per month and will ramp up to 450,000 by January. If each automaker issues national airbag recalls, Takata has agreed to contract with suppliers Autoliv and Daicel to feed the demand.
Although numerous of Takata’s current airbag inflators use the synthetic compound Tetrazole, Shimizu mentioned there was nothing unsafe about the ammonium nitrate utilized in the faulty inflators, only that “manufacturing processes and humidity control in the plant” had caused the problem. 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 said he did not remember seeing them. Final month, a Takata official stated the replacement airbag inflators had a revised chemical compound but have been still primarily based on ammonium nitrate. Shimizu mentioned the replacements have the exact same propellant as just before.
“I’m quite confident that merchandise on the current production line should operate as made and are secure,” Shimizu said.
With regard to allegations that business workers destroyed information after discovering faulty airbags in 2004, Shimizu denied there was “any secret test” and stated the company did conduct tests at that time related to a separate difficulty in which airbag cushions have been tearing on BMW models.
Honda Expands Airbag Recall Nationwide, Takata Tests Show Higher Defect Rates
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