Why are you not changing your defective Takata airbag?



Even if you have been living under a rock for the past five years, you would still have a gist of the on-going global Takata airbag crisis that has affected more than 10 major car brands. Otherwise, to fill you in, Takata Corporation has been supplying defective airbag inflators that will rupture upon deployment and send metal shards in the direction of the occupants.

Both driver and passenger front airbags are susceptible to this defect and this saga has affected more than 100 million cars worldwide. In Malaysia, five carmakers – Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Mazda – have issued recalls over this airbag concern.

What’s saddening is that despite the extensive effort by manufacturers to publicise their respective airbag replacement initiatives, there are still owners who are oblivious about the whole recall exercise. There are even reports of owners not bringing their cars to a service centre for a replacement citing “expensive to replace la, takes up a lot of my time” or worse “it won’t happen to me”.

Enough is enough. Malaysians, please wake up and stop being ignorant of this situation. All charges relating to the airbag recall or any official recall campaign for that matter is completely borne by the manufactures, FREE OF CHARGE. The airbag replacement exercise takes less than an hour to have both driver and passenger side modules replaced – quicker than your average office lunch breaks.

Metal shards that explode upon deployment

 

To date, there have been seven Takata airbag-related deaths recorded here in Malaysia with the most recent incident involving a 2004 Honda City that took the life of the driver last week (21 May 2018). How many more innocent lives must these airbags take before we as owners realise the magnitude of the situation that can be mitigated by a simple visit to the respective dealerships?

Newly-appointed Transport Minister, Anthony Loke has announced that from today (4 June 2018) onwards, owners who have yet to replace their faulty Takata airbags will not be allowed to renew their road tax. The Ministry will require affected owners to produce a certificate from an authorised dealership to prove that they have completed the airbag replacement – certainly a welcomed move from Loke.

As of 29 May 2018, Honda Malaysia has completed 445,000 units of the faulty airbag which translates to 75 percent completion ratio but there 71,315 Honda models on-the-road that have not responded to the recall. UMW Toyota Malaysia, on the other hand, reported 91 percent of Lexus models have completed the airbag replacement but only 53 percent of Toyota models have done their replaced. Which means almost half of the Toyota models you see on the road have not replaced their killer airbags.

If you are still unsure whether your car(s) are involved in this Takata Airbag recall campaign, log on to these online VIN checkers provided by the affected manufacturers in the link below and follow the instructions provided:

All it takes is one phone call, one trip to the dealer and one hour to remove a time bomb in your car. Come on people, it’s time to get those faulty Takata airbags replaced, it has claimed one too many lives…