President Obama isn’t the Recaller-in-Chief, but that’s not stopping two senators from calling on him to expand the Takata airbag recalls into maximum overdrive.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn., above at right) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), in a letter dated Tuesday to the White House, want Takata to recall every airbag inflator in the U.S. that uses the controversial ammonium nitrate propellant, a substance that in Takata’s own testing has been highly susceptible to failure and difficult to control. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as part of a $70 million civil penalty against Takata in November, has directed the Japanese supplier to stop producing driver’s frontal airbag inflators with ammonium nitrate by the end of 2017 and to cease using those inflators in passenger- and side airbags by the end of 2018. Blumenthal and Markey criticized this deal, calling it “an outrageous dereliction of NHTSA’s basic duty to protect consumers.”
“We do not need to wait for yet another preventable death to happen in order to recall the remaining population of vehicles containing ammonium nitrate-propelled airbags,” they wrote.
Blumenthal and Markey had written to Takata in August asking the company to recall all ammonium nitrate inflators. This time, with Obama on the letterhead, they took shots at NHTSA, criticizing the agency for “waiting until someone has died” to recall more cars and a general stance that has “consistently deferred to Takata” in calling for regional campaigns in “high humidity” states where the airbag failures were most common, instead of national recall. The senators claim there are 26 million vehicles on the road with ammonium nitrate airbag inflators that have not been—and in their view, should be—recalled.
Last month, the death of a South Carolina man was reported to NHTSA after his 2006 Ford Ranger’s airbag exploded and cut his neck with shrapnel. News of this death, the 10th worldwide and ninth in the U.S., then prompted expanded recalls from several automakers, including some not part of the original 11 automakers. The exact scope of this latest expansion and the affected models are still unknown, but it may be as high as 5.1 million cars. More than 100 people have been injured as a result of the faulty Takata airbags and more than 19.5 million U.S. vehicles have been recalled.
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