Takata Airbag Recall Expands by 3.3 Million Units

By Orlando Personal Injury Attorney on January 31, 2018

Earlier in the year, the Takata company revisited their product recall and decided that they needed to expand the scope of the notice to include 3.3 million more inflators. The Takata airbag controversy broke open a little more than a year ago after numerous individuals were reported to have died over the course of a few years after the airbags in their front and sides of their cars malfunctioned. Due to a poorly designed and faulty inflating device, a collision involving a car using a Takata airbag manufactured during a certain period of time will not inflate correctly. Instead of deploying and cushioning the person involved in a crash, the airbags have a habit of exploding instead, sending sharp pieces of plastic and metal spraying over the driver and passengers.

The company issued its initial recall after it was found that nearly two-dozen people had been killed in accidents that they should have survived. The investigations began to spring up throughout the world as detectives were finding cuts, lacerations, and deadly wounds on crash victims that did not seem to come from any external part of any vehicle. Looking at the debris scattered throughout the cars, detectives quickly pieced together what the Takata company so desperately wanted to keep hidden: that the airbags were not deploying properly and were causing fatal accidents in situations that should have resulted in only minor injuries.

When the scandal broke, Takata was taken to court. There, the Takata company issued a guilty plea in the case to determine whether or not the company had committed fraud in attempting to hide the defects of the airbags and their inflators. Takata admitted that they had known the entire time that the airbags were defective and that, despite this information, they had allowed them to be sold and installed in consumer vehicles. Settlements for the various cases reached over one-billion dollars and forced the company to enter bankruptcy protection.

Car companies affected in the initial and updated recall include Honda, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, Tesla, Jaguar-Land Rover, and Fiat Chrysler, Daimler Vans, Audi, and Mercedes Benz.

James O. Cunningham

Since 1977, personal injury lawyer James Cunningham has provided effective legal advocacy to people who are injured through the negligent actions of another person or entity throughout the Central Florida area. He fights to obtain recoveries for his clients’ physical and emotional pain and suffering and pursues his clients’ personal injury cases with a commitment to excellence and impeccable preparation.