As scrutiny intensified from lawmakers and federal prosecutors over defective airbags made by the Takata Corporation, Honda confirmed on Thursday that a driver of one of its cars had died after a Takata airbag exploded. It was the fifth death linked to the defect.
The driver was pregnant when she was killed on July 27 in Malaysia, a Honda spokesman in Kuala Lumpur said on Friday. Her unborn baby also died.
“The driver crashed into another vehicle. The driver’s SRS airbag deployed abnormally, and the inflator case was broken,” Jordhat Johan, head of public relations at Honda Malaysia, said in a telephone interview. “The female driver died on the spot,” Mr. Jordhat added.
He said the car the woman was driving was registered in the sultanate of Brunei and was manufactured in Thailand.
The fatal accident — the first linked to a Takata airbag outside the United States — spurred a new round of recalls of about 170,000 Honda vehicles in Europe and Asia. Those airbags, Honda said, could contain the degraded propellant, or explosive, that is thought to have caused the woman’s airbag to deploy so violently.
The recalls underscored wider quality-control problems at Takata than previously known. The fatal rupture in July involved an airbag made at a now-shuttered Takata factory in Georgia, a plant that has not been cited to American regulators in the manufacturer’s shifting explanations of its airbag problems. The faulty airbags in previous recalls were made at two other Takata plants, in Washington State and Mexico, the company told regulators.
The accident in Malaysia involved a 2003 Honda City, a subcompact made for the Asian and European markets, the Honda spokesman Tsutomu Nakamura said by phone. He said the airbag ruptured and sent metal debris into the driver.
He also said that Honda’s Malaysia unit had alerted the automaker’s Tokyo headquarters to the death on Aug. 26, and that Honda had immediately asked Takata to investigate.
Legal pressure on Takata is growing. It has received a subpoena from a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York, the company said in a regulatory filing on Thursday. The subpoena, for documents, is related to defects in Takata airbags, according to the filing with Japan’s Financial Services Agency.
The Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled a hearing on Takata’s airbag issue for next Thursday. A full list of witnesses was not released, but representatives from Takata, Toyota, Chrysler, Honda and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are expected to appear, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat.
In a written statement, Takata’s chairman and chief executive, Shigehisa Takada, acknowledged that an examination of Takata-made airbag inflaters installed in the Honda cars recalled on Thursday had concluded that some were at risk of rupturing. He offered his condolences to the Malaysian driver’s family, but did not provide a more detailed explanation of the episode or the cause of her death.
“We are cooperating fully with the recall and devoting ourselves as a company to strengthening our quality control,” Mr. Takada said. “We will make every effort to regain trust.”
The latest recall — Honda’s 10th over the same defect — covers Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, including China and Japan, but it does not affect the United States, Mr. Nakamura said. That brings the total number of cars recalled over Takata’s airbags to 14.3 million worldwide, 6.2 million of which are Hondas.
Honda said its latest recall covered the 2002 model of the That’s microcar and 2003-8 models of the Fit Aria subcompact in Japan; the 2003-5 Fit Saloon in China; the 2003-5 City in the Asia-Pacific region; and the 2004-5 Fit and Jazz models and the 2004 Civic in Europe.
Ten other automakers, including Toyota, Nissan, BMW and Chrysler, have also recalled cars over the defect.
Takata has said problems with the propellant, or explosives, in the airbags’ inflaters can cause the inflaters to explode, spraying shrapnel into the car’s cabin and injuring the driver or passenger.
Both Honda and Takata have offered a string of reasons for the problems in its propellant, which generates the gases needed to inflate the airbag. They have so far included issues with a machine that presses the propellant into tablets at a Takata factory in Moses Lake, Wash., and damaging exposure to moisture at another plant, in Monclova, Mexico.
But Honda said that the propellant behind July’s airbag rupture case came from a Takata factory in LaGrange, Ga., which Takata shuttered in 2005 as part of its shift in manufacturing facilities to Mexico. The supplier had set up the factory in 1989 as a joint venture between Takata and the German manufacturer Temic.
Mr. Nakamura said the conveyor on a machine that manufactures the propellant tablets had malfunctioned, leaving them on the belt and exposing them to moisture. He said the manufacturing problem, which lasted from November 2001 to November 2003, only affected inflaters for airbags shipped to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Takata and Honda have followed similar patterns of disclosure, admitting more manufacturing glitches as reported deaths or injuries grew, then expanding recalls.
News of the fifth death came after Takata offered a rebuttal Wednesday to accusations by two former employees that it carried out tests on airbags in 2004 in Michigan and found signs of defects, but did not report the results to federal regulators.
The manufacturer said the assertions, reported by The New York Times on Nov. 6, “confuse multiple events” and tell “a story that is simply untrue.”
In Japan, Mr. Takada, the Takata chairman, has stayed out of the public eye during the crisis. A business briefing for industry analysts held in Tokyo on Thursday was attended by lower-ranking executives, and led by Takata’s executive vice president for accounting, Yoichiro Nomura, the company said. (The New York Times)
