Looks like Takata bites the dust

I don’t think it’ll have much impact since their assets are being bought but they are in a tough spot.

I am very grateful that none of our cars is awaiting the airbag replacement

My Camry was never subject to the recall. I’m not certain why, because it’s from the correct time frame

My mom’s 2014 Civic had the airbag replaced sometime before we bought it used. In any case, I already checked for myself, and the recall is completed, as far as that car is concerned. I can only assume the airbag(s) were replaced. I wasn’t there to watch, so I can only hope that the dealership was honest.

Have there been many cases, where a dealership and the manufacturer says an airbag was replaced, when in fact it was NOT . . . ?

There would be ____ to pay if such a car were in an accident, the airbag deploys, shatters and sends metal shards into somebody’s face, and it was determined it was the original faulty accident which was supposedly replaced, not the new and improved version

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My current Mustang JUST got its new inflator, thank goodness. The future is uncertain for Takata’s assets for sure. The liability will likely be wiped away. This is just what carmakers (and tort lawyers) didn’t want.

this web page has some info on how to check your airbags:

Doesn’t look super useful, but better than nothing.

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Had the airbag on our Corolla replaced just 3 weeks ago after a very long wait.

The auto manufacturers are still on the hook for actuator replacement. We didn’t buy the actuators from Takata, Toyota et al did, and our beef is with them. Actuator manufacturing will still take place, and at this point, it would appear that the auto manufacturers will foot the bill. There might be some recourse against the new owner (Ningbo Joyson), who may be required to pay a reduced amount to get bankruptcy proceedings through the court system.

I wondered how my 2005 Accord was not affected by the recall. Manufacturers use more than one supplier so that there are qualified sources in case one of them isn’t available anymore. I guess my car just happened to get an alternately sourced set of actuators. I think that all Takata air bags were recalled, regardless of geographic area. At first, it was just hot, humid areas like Florida. I suppose there might still be drier areas like California where the recalls aren’t covered. We can check by going to safercar.gov or the auto company web site to check on recall status to be sure.

The issue is caused by moisture getting into the accelerant, so cars in southern and humid areas got priority.
Maybe some northern areas will never get the recall.
I read somewhere the replacements are of the old design and will need to be replaced again in a few years.

Yeah, but you know how hot and humid it gets in the Midatlantic area for half the year. I would suspect that our area has had recalls. My Accord is a little different because it is a V6, and maybe that is all it took.

My 07 Mustang got the inflators replaced and I got another recall notice about a week after I sold it. Must have been the old design installed as a stop-gap measure until the “new” design was available.

It looks like Alcoa is in the same sort of trouble Takata got into, with the flammable cladding on the high-rise building in England. Somehow, when a corporation puts out a dangerous product, and knows it is doing it, it should not be able to slip away through bankruptcy. Overloading tires like Ford did, dirty diesels from VW, faulty ignition switches from GM; if a single person cooked up these schemes and hurt people there would be criminal prosecutions. Corporations are just a group of people, and should not be protection from wrong-doing.

Everything I read is they filed chapter 11 NOT chapter 13.

Big difference in which one it is.

Companies can be subject to criminal prosecution. The US Government brought a criminal suit against Toyota for Obsructing the investigation during the unintended acceleration investigation.

Unfortunately even when a company is found guilty of a criminal act…rarely if ever does anyone go to jail.

They can be subject to huge fines. Toyota paid several billion dollars to get the government to drop the unintended acceleration criminal suit. GM seems to have understood the situation when they cooperated fully in the ignition switch debacle, even though it showed a deliberate effort by GM employees to cover the extent of the problem. They still paid big fines, but IMO, nothing compared to what they would have paid if they hadn’t been forthcoming with whatever information the investigators asked for.

According to the NPR story I heard about this issue this morning, declaring bankruptcy won’t relieve them of their recall obligations.

And yet when an individual person commits those crimes they spend a few decades in jail.

I’m not convinced that fines are a deterrent.

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Who do we put in jail? The prosecution would have to prove that specific people acted to ignore a problem on purpose. Do we put the lowest person in the chain in jail because they can be proved to have committed the crime? How would that deter the managers that ordered the crime committed? There doesn’t seem to be anyone with a fiduciary duty to take the blame for anything that goes wrong these days. Certainly not in banks and it appears not in the auto industry either.

Y’all are lucky my 03 trailblazer has one but it is not subject to recall

Currently, there are no recalls or programs associated with your 2003 Chevrolet Trailblazer
From
https://my.gm.com/recalls?evar18=takata_home

Let’s assume my Camry was never on the airbag recall list because it was initially sold in California, and has spent its entire life here

But it might still have a Takata airbag that would be on the list, were it initially sold and registed in a different area

What happens if I move to an area with more humidity?

I’m assuming I’ll be tempting fate and the car will still not be on the list, because of where it was initially sold and registered

As far as I can tell, the recall isn’t perfect, and a few cars might slip through the cracks, which shouldn’t

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Complexity often comes with unintended consequences.