The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced the recall Wednesday after a week of leaks and weeks of discussions with the company. Honda Motor has the most cars with the faulty airbags.
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NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said his own family vehicle has a Takata airbag, and that he is still waiting on a replacement.
The existing programme involved 14 vehicle makers and the new recall adds three additional manufacturers – Tesla, Jaguar Land Rover and Fisker.
Honda disclosed Wednesday that two more people died in Malaysia when their Takata-made airbags ruptured in two separate incidents in April and May respectively.
The recall of inflators that can explode with too much force and hurt people was already the largest in USA history at 28.8 million. Cars with a particular Takata air-bag design susceptible to water intrusion and with prolonged exposure to a high-humidity climate are also at the highest risk, the panel found.
The recalls will be conducted by affected auto makers in five phases starting this month, the agency said. Even with many investigations, US safety regulatory officials were never able to settle the precise cause of the air bag inflator problems. Unless that compound is mixed with a drying agent – a desiccant, as it is known in the trade – it can become unstable when exposed to temperature changes and high humidity over long periods of time.
A combination of time, environmental moisture and fluctuating high temperatures contribute to the degradation of the ammonium nitrate propellant in the inflators.
Takata, responding in a statement, said it’s unaware of any ruptures reported in the inflators covered by the expansion, either in the field or in lab testing. Cars that are located in humid and warm areas will be prioritized. Vehicles in Florida or Gulf Coast states are more at risk than in Washington, D.C., for example. The replacement schedule is aimed at getting vehicles fixed before they are old enough to risk a rupture.
The problem is that Takata uses ammonium nitrate, a blasting agent used in open pit mining operations, as the propellant in its inflators.
Things just got worse for Takata, the Japanese company that makes airbag inflators for trucks and cars.
“There could be further expansion”, Rosekind said.
He said: “This issue is urgent”. However, the latest expansion does not include additional inflators that include that chemical desiccant that absorbs moisture, but if those are proven to be unsafe as well, NHTSA said that would definitely order a new safety campaign.
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“They’re pitching in to the best of their ability, but even with their help, it’s going to be very hard to really ramp up production to cover this”, Upham said. The accelerated recall adds between 35m and 40m new cars to the list, Rosekind said. The inflator assemblies within the air bag are also not giving adequate protection against heat and humidity.
