Honda expands airbag recall to 2.2M more USA vehicles

Continental Automotive Systems is recalling 5 million Honda, Fiat Chyrsler and other vehicles to replace air bag control units built over a five year period that may be defective, according to documents made public on Thursday.

The announcement comes in the middle of a crisis involving Takata Corp. air bag inflators, with approximately 24 million United States vehicles being recalled for the faulty airbag units, making it the largest automotive recall in USA history, according to The Washington Post. Honda told dealers to provide loaner cars for free to any customer who asks for one while waiting for a fix.

Honda has issued two recalls affecting airbags on more than 2.5 million vehicles in the U.S. Pay attention, because this may be a little confusing. The recall affects model year 2008-2010 Accords.

It’s the latest in a massive series of recalls that’s affected multiple automakers that used airbags from Japanese manufacturer Takata. This is on top of over 100 deadly injuries, which have been reported tied to the same defect.

“For the approximately 3 million ACUs produced from 2006 until implementation of the countermeasures, Continental is aware of 521 field returns that were correlated to this ASIC issue”, NHTSA officials said.

The decision raises the number of Honda and Acura autos involved in the growing list of airbag safety recalls to 8.51 million vehicles, the company said.

Honda, meanwhile, said it would recall roughly 341,000 2008-2010 Accord sedans in the U.S.to replace an electronic-control unit susceptible to moisture that can lead to corrosion and eventual malfunction, causing an air bag to fail to deploy.

The NHTSA has always been investigating issues related with air bag inflators. Older models can experience a failure of their airbag control units, which means the supplemental restraint system, or SRS, may not deploy in a crash.

Up to two million vehicles in the USA could be affected, with models sold in Australia also likely to face a recall notice. The repairs are scheduled to begin this summer, and owners should receive a letter notifying them about the recall within 60 days and will get a second message when parts are available.

Now Honda is recalling another 2.2 million, targeting newer Honda and Acura models with faulty airbags in steering wheels-some models as recent as 2016.

The problems with the Continental airbags concern corrosion in the semiconductor material that could cause swelling in the semiconductor.

Earlier this week, Toyota Motor Corp said it was recalling 320,000 2003-2006 US vehicles because of improper programming that could allow them to deploy when not necessary.