“I don’t intend to hold on to my position. Once I’ve delivered this company to a place where it’s not at risk of faltering, I want to pass the baton.” With those words, Shigehisa Takada announced his intent to resign as CEO of embattled airbag manufacturer Takata.
The resignation should come as no surprise. Widely criticized for leaving a vacuum of leadership when the airbag crisis struck, Mr. ...
continue reading...It started out large enough to be noticed, but not so large that it could be considered unmanageable. What it became, however, was not only the largest recall in the history of the automotive industry, but the largest product recall in consumer history.
The first mention of the Takata airbag recall on this blog happened in a short post in August of 2014. Ten million vehicles; mostly Hondas, were recalled ...
continue reading...It’s every driver’s worst nightmare: those microseconds when your brain has done the math and you know you’re about to have a bad collision.
From the moment of first impact, the computers in modern cars are doing math of their own. Calculating the force of the impact against other environmental factors, the car is asking itself millions of times per second if things are bad enough to deploy its airbags.
As consumers, ...
continue reading...Readers who used to spend weekend mornings watching Warner Brothers cartoons may remember classic scenes of characters frantically trying to plug holes in dams. As each hole was plugged with a finger, gum, or anything else that might be nearby, two or three new holes would spring in its place.
Eventually the dam would crack and the character could only turn, look at the viewer, sadly blink a few ...
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Toyota is recalling 766,300 cars and trucks in the United States for continued risk of shrapnel from passenger-side airbags. Toyota recalled vehicles in April 2013 for the same issue, but has discovered that the supplier, the Takata Corporation, may not have provided a comprehensive list of all of the cars that were potentially affected.
These recalls are because of improper ...
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Following at least four deaths and a recent crash in Florida, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) has made an urgent call for the repair of airbag inflation mechanisms in millions of vehicles. CBS of Dallas/Fort Worth reports on the recent warning issued to more than 4.7 million consumers. The urgent warning has been issued because the mechanisms that rapidly inflates airbags could explode and spray metal shards into the driver’s ...
