Are you safe in your vehicle? Is NHTSA adequately protecting you?

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Owners of several vehicles on the lists that have been made available have been defensive "Not my car!' 

Think again!

Evidence indicates that TAKATA KNEW!
Evidence indicates that NHTSA failed to act expeditiously.


Air Bags intended to protect drivers and passengers have become KILLERS to some, showering the driver with shrapnel. 

Air Force Lt. Stephanie Erdman: 

"My passenger only had mild scrapes and bruises," she told lawmakers. "I should not have been injured in the shocking and terrifying way that I was."

A jagged piece of metal shot through Erdman's airbag and imbedded itself in her right eye, while also fracturing her right nasal bone. At the hearing Thursday she displayed a graphic photograph of herself with a chunk of metal protruding from her right eye.

"I was instantly blinded on my right side," she said. "I felt blood gushing down my neck. I was terrified. My vision will never be the same. I will never be the same."

Florida resident Stephanie Erdman suffered severe injuries in September 2013 when a Takata airbag exploded in her Honda Civic, sending metal fragments flying at her face.

http://www.citizensreport.org/2015/11/03/takata-airbag-recall-expanded/

When police got to the scene of a minor car accident in Alhambra, California in September 2013, they thought the driver, Hai Ming Xu, had been shot in the face.

A similar conclusion was reached by Orlando police responding to an accident a year later -- they believed that the driver, Hien Thi Tran, had been the victim of a stabbing that might have caused the accident.

[Hien Thi Tran]....an autopsy released this week found that the cause of death were the metal and plastic fragments that cut her neck.

In most cases the airbags deployed during a minor accident. But one lawsuit charges that the airbags in a 2001 Honda Civic deployed for no apparent reason while the car was stopped at a red light.

The driver in that case, Kristy Williams, barely survived the 2010 accident. Shrapnel tore into her carotid artery. She was able to insert two fingers into the wound to stop the bleeding, and a nearby pedestrian put pressure on the neck wound until help arrived. But she still had several strokes and now suffers from traumatic brain injury, according to her suit.

Takata airbag victims looked like they had been shot or stabbed

http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/autos/takata-airbag-victims/


U.S. investigating all Takata air bags 
with troubled propellant

Franck Robichon / EPA

The U.S. auto safety regulator said it's investigating all Takata Corp. air-bag inflators that use a chemical propellant banned from future models and will compile data to determine whether to expand the industry's broadest recall ever.

The consent order Takata and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration agreed to in November enables the regulator to direct more recalls based on new testing and field data, said Gordon Trowbridge, an NHTSA spokesman. Reuters reported Monday that U.S. authorities were calculating whether 70 million to 90 million more air-bag inflators should be recalled, citing a person with knowledge of the matter.

NHTSA said in the November order that it no longer had confidence in the safety of ammonium nitrate propellant, which remains under scrutiny as Takata inflators have ruptured and sprayed shards of metal and plastic at motorists. The most recent expansion of recalls, announced last month, brought the total number of inflators requiring replacement to more than 28 million, according to NHTSA's website.

"As we've said many times before, the agency believes the number of additional inflators that could be recalled under the consent order we issued Takata in November is in the tens of millions," Trowbridge said in an email.

Takata is cooperating fully with regulators and its customers, and continues to test inflators, build replacement air-bag kits and raise consumer awareness of recalled vehicles, spokesman Hideyuki Matsumoto said. He declined to say how many inflators with ammonium nitrate Takata has produced.

Transportation SecretaryAnthony Foxx called for vigilance even among automakers that had yet to recall vehicles using Takata air bags and said in an interview with Bloomberg News in November that repair programs may widen.

In January, NHTSA directed Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz to recall vehicles for the first time. Tesla Motors and Tata Motors's Jaguar Land Rover also are among Takata's customers using air bag inflators with ammonium nitrate propellants.

Takata produced about 87.3 million inflators with two kinds of ammonium nitrate propellant and supplied them to auto manufacturers in North America as of the end of June 2015, the company told NHTSA in response to an order issued that month. Production of those inflators was ongoing for at least a dozen automakers at that time, including Toyota, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen and Tesla, according to Takata's response to the NHTSA order.

Reuters reported that as many as 120 million Takata inflators in U.S. vehicles contain ammonium nitrate propellant, citing company documents verified by two former Takata managers.

Honda Motor Co., Takata's biggest customer and a minority shareholder, is not aware of whether 90 million more air bags need to be replaced, spokeswoman Yuka Abe said. The automaker's priority is to find out the root cause of the air-bag inflator ruptures and replace them as soon as possible, she said.

The Associated Press last week cited unidentified experts as saying there could be as many as 50 million Takata air-bag inflators in cars that have yet to be called back for repairs.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-takata-air-bags-recall-20160222-story.html