Do you own a car that was made between the years of 2000-2008? Is it an Acura, BMW, Chrysler, Dodge/Ram, Ford, Honda, Infiniti, Lexus, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Pontiac, Saab, Subaru, or Toyota? If so your model may be eligible for a recall.
Approximately 7.8 million vehicles are under the recall from 10 different automakers. This recall affects either the front driver’s air bag, passenger air bag or in some cases both front air bags. This is the case with a widely used Japanese made airbag, from a brand called Takata; who is coming under fire for releasing a faulty airbag. A few deaths and hundreds of injuries have been reported due to this air bag defect. If your vehicle has this type of air bag and you are involved in a car accident that is severe enough to deploy your cars air bag system and your vehicle has this type of system then you may suffer injury from the air bag itself, never mind the accident. These airbags have a critical flaw of propelling too violently and expelling dangerous shrapnel into the interior of the car, potentially injuring the people inside. Instead of using a controllable propellant, Takata employed ammonium nitrate, which reacts strongly to high amounts of moisture related to humidity- causing the airbags to malfunction dangerously.
To check if your vehicle is on the recall list visit safecar.gov and enter your vehicle identification number located in the lower left hand corner (driver’s side) of your windshield or on your vehicle registration.
Vehicle owners with theses air bag system are urged to take immediate action
While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is doing everything it can to make the recall of these dangerous airbags nationwide; they are receiving resistance from car manufacturers- who had already been forced to recall over 14 million vehicles on 11 different models to replace only driver- side airbags, but only in high-humidity locations like Florida, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico for example; however recent ruptures in places like North Carolina, California, Virginia, Oklahoma, and central Japan are making this issue much more serious. The increase of these failures is not only causing great expense to car manufacturers who have faulty airbags, but also putting the safety of even more vehicle owners in danger.
Statements from the Manufacturer
While Takata released a statement saying that they “remained committed to addressing all safety issues as promptly as possible”, they also agree that the current field isn’t including all necessary actions to meet the current safety risk, especially with plans to avoid repairing passenger side airbags because they weren’t included in the safety concerns and hadn’t yet shown any risk of danger.
N.H.T.S.A. responded with a statement saying that they will use the “full extent of the law” to expand the recall, to compel automakers to comply with statutory powers- albeit it might cause confusion to the consumers because the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration has yet to compile a complete detailed list of all the models and years that have been affected; but it’s expected that the expansions to the recall will affect millions of vehicles that have been made by practically every car maker for a decade.
The regulators for the Highway Safety Administration had made several demands in addition to their statements:
-Takata should provide the information on the chemical composition and manufacturing processes for their propellants as well as specifying when they made changes to the propellant
-Takata should turn over the names and titles of any employee responsible for developing the chemical composition; as well as documentation that using ammonium nitrate in the propellant might have been a problem, as well as those involved in the investigation and decision-making processes concerning these airbags.
If you have been injured in a car accident and think it may be a result of this faulty air bag, you should may contact an experienced injury attorney who deals with car accident injury lawsuits. If you think your airbag might be included in this recall, contact your nearest auto dealership to have it inspected and or replaced. For a list of the models listed in this recall, click here.