Toyota recalling 1.6 million vehicles due to defective Takata airbags

Tokyo:Toyota Motor Corp.is recalling 1.6 million vehicles for defective air bags supplied by embattled Japanese manufacturer Takata Corp.

First to abandon Takata was Honda, Takata’s biggest vehicle airbag customer.

Toyota has made the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism here aware that it has issued a recall on 1,612,670 vehicles spanning some of its most popular models including the Corolla and Vitz models, the automaker said on Wednesday.

Honda, Takata’s largest customer, announced this month that it will not use the supplier’s airbag inflators on all future models, citing an investigation into Takata internal documents that suggested the company “misrepresented and manipulated test data”.

The newest member of the Takata going away party is Ford and its announcement of no more Takata ammonium nitrate airbags.

A Takata spokesperson told WSJ that the reporting discrepancies are not directly related to the malfunctioning airbags at the center of Takata’s ongoing crisis, where moisture-contaminated ammonium nitrate propellant inside the airbag inflator can explode too forcefully, destroying metal components of the airbag and shooting metallic shrapnel into the passenger compartment during airbag deployment. But with replacement parts in short supply, Toyota had said the cars were safe enough to stay on the road for a while.

The new batch of Toyota cars deemed unsafe means that the auto maker has now recalled 15 million vehicles which have the airbag installed. However, the airbag inflator that exploded in the Nissan had passed the leak test yet still exploded.

The recall will affect models from countries like Britain, Spain, Italy in Europe as well as Japan. Of these injuries, at least five took place in Toyota cars and eight people around the world have been killed by the faulty airbags.

The problem has led to the recall of 19.2 million vehicles in the United States, and government regulators are investigating.

Documents from 2005 written by U.S. Takata engineer Bob Schubert laid out what he saw as altered information on different Takata inflators, according to the Journal.