Honda Motor's U.S. unit confirmed Friday that a renter of a 2001 Honda Civic died from an exploding Takata airbag in a crash last September, raising the death toll from the faulty airbag to eight.
The airbag inflator ruptured when the car crashed in a Los Angeles area on Sept. 7, causing fatal injuries to Jewel Brangman, 26, the automaker said, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Brangman is the sixth Honda driver in the U.S. to be killed by metal parts of the Takata airbag inflator that flew when it deployed. The carmaker also recorded 60 injuries from exploding airbags.
In April, Brangman's father, Alexander Brangman, of San Diego, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Honda, Takata and the Sunset Car Rental LLC of San Diego, the last owner of the Honda Civic, according to the Associated Press.
However, Honda claimed in a statement that the driver's side airbag inflator in the car Brangman was driving was subject to recalls since July 2009, and that it sent four recall notices to different registered owners of the vehicle starting August 2009, according to Reuters. The Sunset Car Rentals bought the car in November 2011 and Brangman rented it on Aug. 17, before another recall notice was sent out in September.
The company announced on Monday that it is recalling certain 2001-2005 Civic and 2003-2007 Accord models sold in the U.S. to replace their Takata passenger front airbag inflators, free of charge. The move adds another 1.39 million passenger front airbag inflators recalled nationwide, according to a statement from Honda.
Meanwhile, U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Anthony Foxx announced on Friday that at the agency's insistence, Japanese airbag manufacturer Takata has acknowledged that a defect exists in its air bag inflators.
Takata has agreed to a national recall of certain types of driver and passenger side air bag inflators, expanding the number of vehicles to be recalled for defective Takata inflators to nearly 34 million, according to the DOT.
Foxx also announced that the Department's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a Consent Order to Takata requiring the company to cooperate in all future regulatory actions that the NHTSA undertakes in its ongoing investigation and oversight of Takata.
The Department has established a new website, www.SaferCar.gov/RecallsSpotlight, to provide regular updates on the status of other recalls and of NHTSA's investigation.
NHTSA's analysis of test results and engineering reports from independent organizations points to moisture infiltrating the defective inflators over extended periods of time, which causes changes in the structure of the chemical propellant that ignites when an airbag deploys. The degraded propellant ignites too quickly, producing excess pressure that causes the inflator to rupture and sends metal shards into the passenger cabin that can lead to serious injury or death, according to the NHTSA.
