Second Takata Airbag Hearing: Root Cause Unknown

The second Takata airbag hearing took place earlier today with a major development being not what Takata knows, but what they don’t know. According to testimony from Takata’s Senior Vice President for Global Quality Assurance, Hiroshi Shimizu, the organization doesn’t officially know exactly what the root cause of their faulty airbag issues. When Shimizu was pressed for further insight into what is causing the potentially fatal airbag defects he admitted that they aren’t sure. “Congressman, we don’t identify the root cause yet,” Shimizu explained. “But we are of the strong opinion that (there) is a factor contributing to this defect: which is high humidity, temperature and the life of the product.” Shimizu also apologized on behalf of Takata in his opening statement.

The revelation by Takata that they still don’t know precisely what is causing the airbag inflators to explode came hours after the company declined a NHTSA ultimatum. They said that the data available doesn’t support the need to do expand the recall nationally. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave Takata until Midnight Tuesday evening to issue a national airbag recall. According to multiple reports, Takata has declined that demand, which the NHTSA said would incur the wrath of hefty fines, which could be as high as $7,000 per vehicle.

Also testifying before congress were executives from Honda, BMW and Toyota. Honda North America’s Executive Vice President, Rick Schostek, took the time during his testimony to set the record straight about what he called a faulty news story. He said that a news article claimed that Honda was, “Asking dealers not to contact customers. They were misconstruing a message that we had sent to our dealers…we had begun 93,000 calls, sent out 125,000 emails and sent out 76,000 post cards.”

Takata has refused for the time being to issue that national recall. Who knows what they will do if public pressure grows. Does your store service any of the vehicles impacted by the Takata recall? What are customers saying about this recall when they come to your store?