US regulators order Volkswagen to provide further details on rupture of Takata air bag
19 Aug 2015
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Monday issued a special order to Volkswagen calling for more information on the incident, in which a side-curtain air bag in a 2015 Volkswagen Tiguan SUV manufactured by Takata of Japan ruptured on 7 June in Missouri.
Though the incident left no one in need of medical attention, the German auto maker disclosed the incident to regulators on 15 July, according to the special order.
While regulators asked Volkswagen for information as part of a continuing probe and oversight of Takata, according to both companies, the incident did not appear to be related to air-bag problems currently under scrutiny.
Those cases involved older vehicles and ruptures that often occurred after parts had aged and experienced prolonged exposure to heat and high humidity.
''Volkswagen at this point considers this an individual case,'' a spokesman said.
Volkswagen AG and Tesla Motors Inc are the only automakers to avoid US recalls so far, even as they continued to use Takata Corp, air-bag inflators,
which had led to a global safety crisis.
Takata has supplied 887,055 air-bag inflators to Volkswagen since January 2011, and a combined 184,926 units for Tesla since January 2012, and the two companies were ongoing customers, Takata said in a letter last month to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
In June the company asked Takata to list the companies in North America that it supplied inflators containing ammonium nitrate propellant.
The disclosure underscored the risk for Volkswagen and Tesla to join 11 automakers already recalling vehicles, if investigations determined that ammonium nitrate was not safe to use.
According to Takata that chemical appeared to be one of many contributing factors into the air bag ruptures, along with flawed manufacturing processes.
About 32 million vehicles had been recalled in the US, and the devices were linked to eight deaths and 130 injuries.
''I'm very sure that the propellant is the problem,'' Jochen Siebert, managing director at JSC Automotive Consulting, said on phone. ''Of course, if you add a bad process on top of that, it only makes this even worse,'' Bloomberg reported.
For the first time since the deadly defects in airbags made by his family's company came to be known, the reclusive chief executive of the Japanese supplier issued a public apology in June. (See: Takata chief apologises for airbag deaths).
