Takata Recall: Mazda Goes National, Honda Global

Mazda has announced that they will do what Takata will not: issue a national airbag recall. During a hearing last week with the Senate Commerce committee, Takata’s Senior Vice President of Global Quality Assurance, Hiroshi Shimizu, announced the company would not expand their regional recall. Takata currently has recalls in place for their airbags in the southeastern United States and U.S. territories. This is due to the propensity for high humidity in those areas, which can cause the airbags to explode and shoot metal shards during airbag inflation.

During his testimony in the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Shimizu said, “Based on the data we are collecting…the data still supports that we should remain focused on the regions with high temperature and high humidity.” Numerous lawmakers disagreed with Takata’s decision to not expand the airbag recall as did Clarence Ditlow, the Executive Director of the Center For Auto Safety, when he spoke to Bloomberg. Ditlow said, “If Takata continues to stonewall on this recall, NHTSA is going to take them to court and their customers are going to leave them in droves. I don’t see a winning scenario in this for Takata to fight a national recall.” While many see Takata as falling short on their decision to not expand the recall, some automakers are making a push to do just that. Honda, Chrysler, Ford and now Mazda are making a push towards recalling more vehicles equipped with Takata airbags. Mazda has announced that they will be expanding their recall to a national level, however they don’t know for sure when that will be. Reports simply indicate that they will do it, but are still in the planning stages. Honda, however, Takata’s largest client is going to expand their airbag safety recall globally. The Honda recall has been called “investigative,” and is still the preliminary planning phases. According to Reuters, Honda recently expanded their airbag recall nationwide, to include an additional 2.6 million vehicles, bringing the total number of Takata airbags recalls across all brands, since 2008 to over 19 million.

As automakers seem to be one-by-one joining the call for a national Takata airbag recall, how does that impact your dealership? What have you seen in terms of recall volume to this point? What do you think is going to be the long-term impact of this ever-expanding airbag recall?