Auto airbags maker Takata fined $14,000 a day to force compliance

US transportation secretary Anthony Foxx said yesterday that the world's largest air-bag maker, Takata, would be fined $14,000 a day until it complied with federal demands for additional information on air bags that had led to the death of six people and maimed dozens more, the online edition of The Washington Post reported.

According to Foxx, those air bags could  explode with such force that they had grievously injured people and, in a half-dozen cases, killed them.  He added, to remove that threat and get to the root cause of the defect, the government needed Takata's cooperation, and so far they had not demonstrated it.

The metal inflation canisters on some Takata air bags had been shattered by the propellent they contained, spraying drivers and passengers with shards of metal. More that 22 million vehicles, which included 17 million in the US, had been recalled by automakers, with only 2 million US vehicles repaired as of December.

He added, the agency had pushed hard to get millions of defective Takata air bags off US roads.

Foxx also called on Congress to mandate that rental cars and used cars up for sale that were under recall be repaired before they were rented or sold. The call comes after the most recent death attributed to a Takata air bag in a used car that was under recall when he bought it, NHTSA said.

Meanwhile, sunherald.com reported that Foxx called Takata a "bad actor" and said the fines would grow each day that it failed to comply with two special orders issued last year by the department's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Takata, with a 20-per cent share of the world air-bag and seat-belt markets, had resisted demands to recall its driver's side air bags nationwide, although automakers had made recalls themselves.

The NHTSA further demanded data from the company, but,  in a letter to Takata said that it had failed to explain a "deluge" of 2.4 million pages of documents that were turned over.

Under federal law Takata is required to provide a catalogue or index with the documents so investigators knew what to look for.