Over 30 injuries and four deaths in the U.S. are said to have been caused by airbags made by Takata. The safety devices, supplied by the company for more than 20 years, are said to have deployed with too much force thereby spewing sharp metal shrapnel at the vehicle's occupants.
Recently, a woman died in Florida after enduring severe gashes on her neck as a result of the crash. Initially, the police suspected the incident as a homicide case. On the week that followed her death, the car company sent notification that the airbag was under recall.
There are at least ten automakers that have already issued recalls for faulty airbags. Most of them are focusing first on repairing cars for those customers who come from places where the temperature is humid. It is believed that high humidity is one possible cause of airbag malfunction which makes the supposedly safety device to explode instead of deploy normally.
The additional quarterly charge, on top of the previously set amount of 75 billion yen for airbag recalls, would be used to cover the estimated cost of recent recalls that were announced by Toyota, Honda and Nissan. It is highly likely that Takata will book the charge in time for the company's results for the first half of the present fiscal year which shall end in March 2015. Takata is scheduled to report their quarterly results on the sixth of November.
The projected cost would specifically be used by the company as a response to recalls of around 570,000 vehicles that needed a fix in their defective airbags.
In August, Honda announced that it is recalling around 63,200 vehicles. This month, Toyota said it is recalling 247,000 cars in order to fix the faulty Takata airbags. Last week, Nissan announced plans to recall 260,000 vehicles globally because of the defective airbags.
Takata and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) agreed to work together to determine just how many millions more vehicles on the road are affected by the safety defect caused by prolonged exposure to humid climates. Customers from Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands would have the airbags in their vehicles collected and tested while the investigation is conducted.
"We have been consistently cooperating with NHTSA, and we will continue to do so during the defect investigation that the agency recently opened, but we also stand by the quality of our products," said Takata in a statement.
