Honda Recalls Another 438,000 Vehicles for Airbag Problems
Feb. 11, 2010 – The Toyota Motor Corporation isn’t the only Japanese automaker dealing with a massive vehicle recall. The Honda Motor Company today announced an additional recall of 438,000 vehicles due to concerns over potentially faulty airbags.
Vehicles covered by the latest recall by Honda are the 2001 and 2001 Honda Accord, Civic, CR-V and Odyssey models and the 2002 Honda Acura TL. The 438,000 vehicles recalled are in addition to some 646,000 Honda Fit models recalled two weeks ago.
The recalls have been issued to fix faulty airbag inflators, which sometimes apply too much pressure when inflating airbags during an accident and result in the inflating mechanism to break apart and sending potentially lethal shrapnel flying into the passenger compartment. The problem has been experienced in at least a dozen vehicles, resulting in one known fatality, according to Honda officials.
Honda officials previously issued vehicle recalls in November 2008 and July 2009 for the same problem in various models and recently expanded the recall to more than a million vehicles to better ensure safety.
“We have decided to recall all inflator assemblies that were not confirmed by 100 percent automatic inspection during production because we cannot be absolutely certain they will all perform as designed, even though recent testing of units from this production process performed correctly,” Honda officials said in a joint news release.
While Honda’s latest recall efforts include more than a million vehicles, the total number recalled are only about a tenth the amount rival Japanese automaker Toyota has recalled in recent months. Toyota has recalled nearly 10 million vehicles worldwide, and company officials are scrambling to maintain the Toyota’s reputation for building quality vehicles.
Toyota’s most recent recall of some 437,000 hybrid vehicles with potentially faulty brakes comes in addition to the about 9 million vehicles across eight model lines Toyota officials recently have recalled already worldwide – including about 2.3 million vehicles in the United States.
Officials for the U.S. National Highway Traffic Highway and Safety Administration recently opened an investigation into the high number of complaints federal officials have received regarding braking issues with the Toyota Prius hybrid, which was not among the eight models and 9 million vehicles worldwide the auto manufacturer previously recalled due to problems with the gas pedal sticking and causing sudden acceleration.
Federal officials said combining all the complaints received on all eight recalled 2010 Toyota models wouldn’t amount to half of the 171 complaints already received on the 2010 Toyota Prius. Some 124 of the complaints about the Prius focus on similar braking issues. By comparison, Toyota recalled its Corolla model, which only had 33 complaints thus far in 2010.