By CRM Staff
Buffalo, New York — May 15, 2018 — The U.S. Government has warned ten major car manufacturers that they must speed up the recall of more than 70 million defective airbag inflation devices in cars across the United States.
Already linked to more than 20 deaths and hundreds of injuries, the Japanese company behind the defective safety devices went belly-up last year after it emerged that their product would, on occasion, be set off without warning and could send shards of metal careening through the cabin of a vehicle.
In a letter from Heidi King, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration deputy administrator, Toyota, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, BMW, Subaru, Fiat-Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Mitsubishi were told they would be obliged to participate in a meeting to explain why more than seven million vehicles, that the NHTSA had expected to be recalled in 2017, have not yet been fixed.
Canada has also seen recalls, with Honda, Acura, Volkswagen, Ford and Mazda models hit with recalls.
Filled with enough pressurized gas to send shards of metal flying at close to the speed of sound, many repairers may not realize how long they have been working in the danger zone. Some of the cars included on Canada’s recall list have been rolling into collision repair facilities for almost two decades, including the 2001-2002 Honda Civic and Accord models.
In fact, there are two models considered so dangerous to drive that OEMs have advised drivers to avoid driving them until the inflators have been removed – Ford’s 2006 Ranger and Mazda’s 2006 B-Series.
