When you purchase a car, you know the car’s brand, but chances are there are probably a ton of parts within a car that are made by other companies too, kind of like how smartphones have chipsets made by Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, MediaTek, and etc. That being said for those after a bit of trivia, Takata is the airbag supplier for Honda, or at least they were.
The company has since announced that they will no longer be using Takata’s products in their cars, claiming that Takata had apparently “misrepresented and manipulated test data.” Given the recent car scandals in which there was some cheating in tests in order to meet compliance, no doubt Honda is trying to avoid being the next Volkswagen.
In fact recently the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had given Takata a $70 million penalty for failing to disclose defects in its airbags, in which millions are now being recalled. That penalty could even go higher to $130 million if the company does not live up to the terms of the consent order.
According to transportation secretary Anthony Foxx, “Delay, misdirection and a refusal to acknowledge the truth allowed a serious problem to become a massive crisis. When we first brought this issue to light, there was a lot of denial on the part of Takata.” To date there have been 8 deaths and over 100 accidents that are supposedly linked to the defective airbags.
In a statement made by Takata spokesman Jared Levy, “We do not believe that these issues, which we brought to the attention of N.H.T.S.A., are connected to the current recalls, which extensive testing continues to show are associated with long-term exposure to conditions of high heat and absolute humidity.”