Takata is not Legally Bound to Answer Senate!

 

Senate committee has arisen a detailed enquiry of Takata airbag and keen to bring it to public.

The senator has put a question mark on the credibility and reliability on Takata’s airbags. The material used in the manufacturing of Takata’s airbag didn’t provide sufficient safety measure in the light of the recent unfortunate incident. They urge to voluntarily recall of airbags made by Japanese suppliers. It is now on a serious note of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

It was reported in June 2015, when Takata airbag was ruptured suddenly in Volkswagen Tiguan. NHTSA is calling special enquiry on Volkswagen to provide in-depth details of the incident. It is important to note that there are 18.6 million vehicles carrying Takata’s airbag alone in the US. There are other millions in the assembly process, containing Takata’s airbags.

The situation could get adverse if NHTSA issues another special order of “recall request”. However the Senate committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has accepted few recall requests and directed Takata to pay compensation of amount $625 million to the victims of airbag defect.

According to the recent reports of incidents, eight people have died and around 139 injured from defective airbags. Here, it is important to mention, GM has already paid $625 million to 400 victims of ignition switch defect.

Takata’s vice president has highlighted few important points during a house committee hearing back in June. He said in an explanation, it was found that airbags had shown flaws under the circumstance of a highly humid situation for a longer period of time.

Takata is an only airbag supplier using ammonium nitrate as a “main propellant” but it would change to the other safe material like Tetrazole in manufacturing of airbags on the demand of its customers.

He argued, there is no concrete evidence that ammonium nitrate had caused that defect. Takata still fails to identify the real root cause and continues to take further test parts. The ammonium nitrate is unsafe to use in airbags as evidence by former Takata’s employees back in 1999. They claimed that the company is focused on saving cost, because there is one tenth of the price difference of both materials.

In short, a Senate committee has directed the company to release all of the relevant information to the public without any unnecessary delays. It includes information about the material used, previous and current designs, test results and complete details of its suppliers.