Airbags In 2001 To 2003 Hondas Are The Most Dangerous, Need To Be Fixed Now

Since people now tend to keep our cars longer than we used to, there are still plenty of model year 2001, 2002, and 2003 cars from Honda and Acura still on the road. Recent tests show that each time one of the vehicles’ airbags deploys, there’s up to a 50% chance that it will rupture, posing a serious risk to drivers and passengers.

We know that hundreds of millions of vehicles out there have potentially hazardous airbags, so what’s the rush with these Honda and Acura cars, SUVS, and minivans? In an announcement today, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shared recent test results that eight out of the ten deaths in the United States attributed to Takata airbags occurred in Honda vehicles from this period.

Takata performed the tests at NHTSA’s request, and they showed that airbags ruptured as frequently as 50% of the time under test conditions. Ideally, you hope that a vehicle’s airbag never deploys, but it could be a serious problem for passengers if one of these does.

The vehicles were previously recalled between five and eight years ago, and most had their airbags replaced with a less dangerous model back then. However, NHTSA reports that there are still 313,000 of them still on the roads that haven’t been fixed, and the agency wants to get word out to their owners to repair them right away.

The U.S. Transportation Secretary, Anthony Foxx, is not messing around, saying in a statement that “folks should not drive these vehicles unless they are going straight to a dealer to have them repaired immediately, free of charge.”

Here’s the list of models that are in need of immediate repairs.

• 2001-2002 Honda Civic
• 2001-2002 Honda Accord
• 2002-2003 Acura TL
• 2002 Honda CR-V
• 2002 Honda Odyssey
• 2003 Acura CL
• 2003 Honda Pilot

Vehicles that have spent all or most of their time in warm, humid regions are the most susceptible to the defect, but all cars from these models are under recall. If an airbag from one of these models deploys, it poses a serious risk of rupturing and injuring the driver and passengers with shrapnel, which can kill them even when the crash that caused the airbag to deploy wouldn’t have.

NHTSA: New test data on particular subset of Takata air bag inflators shows substantially higher risk [NHTSA]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist