Honda issues another recall over airbag issue; India hopefully not on the list

This is turning out to be a forgettable month for Honda and Toyota. It all started with Toyota’s recall of millions of vehicles over an issue with accelerator pedals, then Honda’s recall of the Jazz and City over faulty power window switches followed by braking issues in the Prius and now we have this – Honda will recall over 4,00,000 units over problems with SRS airbags in its Accord, Civic, Acura TL, Cr-V, Odyssey, Pilot, JDM Honda Inspire, JDM Honda Saber, and JDM Honda Lagreat models.

This is how the problem started – Airbags are inflated by a propellant (the chemical that reacts to form a gas that eventually inflates the airbag) and some of it was found to be defective. As a result, when the driver’s airbag is deployed in the event of an accident, there is a possibility that an abrupt increase in the inflator’s internal pressure may rupture the casing of the inflator and cause fragments of airbag parts to scatter possibly causing injury to vehicle occupants.

This problem was identified way back in 2008 due to excessive moisture intake by the inflator propellant and Honda recalled 4000 vehicles in USA and Canada over this issue and fixed them. To Honda’s horror, further analysis revealed that there were additional incidents involving vehicles outside of the range of the original recall. Thus Honda issued a second recall on the 29th of July 2009. Units affected in the second recall are just over half a million units, including 1,532 units in Japan and over 15,000 other cars outside Japan, US and Canada.

But that’s not all – it was later identified that there is a possibility that the defect occurs when the stamping pressure during the production of the inflator propellant is not high enough. Honda concluded that adequate stamping pressure management was not performed for production of the inflator propellant using a certain stamping machine was the cause of the problem. So Honda decided to expand the recall to include all vehicles using compressed inflator propellant produced with this particular equipment. This affects a further 437,763 units.

While no official statement has been released, we expect the same in due course of time. Honda and Toyota are in serious trouble here.

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