Toyota recalls another 1.7 million cars over faulty airbags
Takata's airbag tech is still problematic years later.
The problems with Takata's potentially defective airbags persist years after they began. Toyota has recalled another 1.7 million cars worldwide, 1.3 million of them in the US, over possible faults in their airbag actuators. The new effort covers vehicles made between 2010 and 2015 and comes just weeks after Toyota issued a repeat recall for 65,000 cars after concerns an initial fix still wasn't safe.
The company isn't alone. Ford said last week that it was recalling just shy of 1 million cars in the US due to their Takata airbags. This was already the largest recall effort to date, with 37 million cars requiring fixes in the US alone. It's been expensive, too, with Honda, Nissan and others setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims. Takata itself filed for bankruptcy in 2017 after recalls and fraud settlements sank its business. It has since been snapped up by Key Safety Systems, with its name subsumed into the resulting company Joyson Safety Systems.
Toyota has good reason to continue being cautious. There have been over 290 injuries and 23 deaths linked to Takata airbags rupturing in collisions. While it's unclear how many of those airbags are still at risk, Toyota and others don't want to take further chances.
