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I got an alert to that effect on my phone this morning, not from my car manufacturer but from CNN. Any other Honda owners see that?
The associated CNN article paints a grim picture:
"Federal safety regulators warned owners of more than 300,000 Hondas and Acuras to immediately stop driving their cars until their Takata airbags are replaced. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said new tests show the airbags have a 50% chance of exploding when deployed in an accident -- compared to a 1% chance for other airbags."
Wow, that sounds bad! I went to the Honda page on the topic and discovered that sure enough, my 2013 Fit is in on the recall list. This seemed odd to me because I have been hearing about the exploding airbags for years, but when I looked up the vehicles involved it was always a small selection of cars a decade older than mine. I poked around online until I found this very detailed writeup of the history of the hapless Takata airbag. To make a long story slightly shorter, it looks like there have been anecdotal reports of this defect since about 2004, but the first official recall wasn't issued until 2013 (Toyota). Bit by bit, the recall kept expanding and expanding, and now includes most of the Japanese car companies and ALL of the US ones! So don't assume you are immune if you drive a Buick.
But how widespread is this, really? Do I actually have to stop driving my 3 year old car while I wait for what is probably going to be weeks or months to get an appointment to get this corrected? I say no. All of the reports of airbags actually exploding occurred in cars built before 2005, and most of those are in "high-humidity" climates like Florida.
That 50% defect rate quoted in the CNN article (and all the other news outlets I checked) is alarmist and misleading, phrased to sound like it applies to all Honda owners. It turns out that what the NHTSA press release said was this:
New test data on a particular subset of defective Takata air bag inflators in certain model-year 2001-2003 Honda and Acura vehicles show a far higher risk of ruptures during air bag deployment, prompting an urgent call from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to ensure that unrepaired vehicles in this population are found and fixed before they cause further injuries or fatalities... With as high as a 50 percent chance of a dangerous air bag inflator rupture in a crash, these vehicles are unsafe and need to be repaired immediately,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “Folks should not drive these vehicles unless they are going straight to a dealer to have them repaired immediately, free of charge....Ruptures are far more likely in inflators in vehicles that have spent significant periods of time in areas of high absolute humidity—particularly Florida, Texas, other parts of the Gulf Coast, and Southern California. Testing of the inflators from these vehicles show rupture rates as high as 50 percent in a laboratory setting.
So if you have a Honda or Acura built between 2001 and 2003 and driven primarily in the gulf states, get that thing to a dealer ASAP.
And I guess I'll try to figure out how to get on the schedule to get this fixed. I hope there's a way to schedule it online, because I sure don't want to try to get through to a Honda service phone number the day after this news broke.
The associated CNN article paints a grim picture:
"Federal safety regulators warned owners of more than 300,000 Hondas and Acuras to immediately stop driving their cars until their Takata airbags are replaced. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said new tests show the airbags have a 50% chance of exploding when deployed in an accident -- compared to a 1% chance for other airbags."
Wow, that sounds bad! I went to the Honda page on the topic and discovered that sure enough, my 2013 Fit is in on the recall list. This seemed odd to me because I have been hearing about the exploding airbags for years, but when I looked up the vehicles involved it was always a small selection of cars a decade older than mine. I poked around online until I found this very detailed writeup of the history of the hapless Takata airbag. To make a long story slightly shorter, it looks like there have been anecdotal reports of this defect since about 2004, but the first official recall wasn't issued until 2013 (Toyota). Bit by bit, the recall kept expanding and expanding, and now includes most of the Japanese car companies and ALL of the US ones! So don't assume you are immune if you drive a Buick.
But how widespread is this, really? Do I actually have to stop driving my 3 year old car while I wait for what is probably going to be weeks or months to get an appointment to get this corrected? I say no. All of the reports of airbags actually exploding occurred in cars built before 2005, and most of those are in "high-humidity" climates like Florida.
That 50% defect rate quoted in the CNN article (and all the other news outlets I checked) is alarmist and misleading, phrased to sound like it applies to all Honda owners. It turns out that what the NHTSA press release said was this:
New test data on a particular subset of defective Takata air bag inflators in certain model-year 2001-2003 Honda and Acura vehicles show a far higher risk of ruptures during air bag deployment, prompting an urgent call from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to ensure that unrepaired vehicles in this population are found and fixed before they cause further injuries or fatalities... With as high as a 50 percent chance of a dangerous air bag inflator rupture in a crash, these vehicles are unsafe and need to be repaired immediately,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “Folks should not drive these vehicles unless they are going straight to a dealer to have them repaired immediately, free of charge....Ruptures are far more likely in inflators in vehicles that have spent significant periods of time in areas of high absolute humidity—particularly Florida, Texas, other parts of the Gulf Coast, and Southern California. Testing of the inflators from these vehicles show rupture rates as high as 50 percent in a laboratory setting.
So if you have a Honda or Acura built between 2001 and 2003 and driven primarily in the gulf states, get that thing to a dealer ASAP.
And I guess I'll try to figure out how to get on the schedule to get this fixed. I hope there's a way to schedule it online, because I sure don't want to try to get through to a Honda service phone number the day after this news broke.
