Jaguar Land Rover is recalling more than 41,000 SUVs in North America after discovering an issue with the airbag system.
The luxury automobile brand owned and run by India's Tata Motors, is the latest involved in a slew of airbag recalls. The defect with the passenger side air bag affects more than 40,000 Land Rover SUVs in the United States. The faulty airbags elevate the risk of injuries by failing to deploy in a crash.
The recall notice was posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on its official website, Wednesday. According to the documents, the recall affects two Land Rover models, 17,066 LR2s from 2010-15 and 23,485 Range Rover Evoques released in 2012-13. In these affected models, the system could fail and result in partial or complete failure of front seat passenger's air bag.
Certain airbag systems are designed to deploy in case an adult is in the front passenger seat. But the defect prevents the airbag from deploying, as the system fails to recognize a person sitting and sends the wrong signal to shut down the air bag system, New York Times reported, Wednesday.
The company said a software update will fix the problem. The car maker has not received any complaints of accidents, injuries or deaths related to the problem.
The focus on vehicle recalls has been on high alert, mainly after General Motors' fiasco with its ignition switches in small cars. The car maker recalled 2.6 million Chevy Cobalts that were linked to 13 deaths. This prompted other car makers such as Toyota, Hyundai, Honda and others to start addressing customer complaints more seriously.
Faulty air bags are slowly gaining automakers' attention, as a defective inflator can cause an explosion and fling hot shrapnel around causing damage to the passenger and the driver. BMW recalled 1.6 million cars worldwide for the same airbag defect in July after Toyota discovered the problem in 2.27 million of its vehicles in June. Nissan, Honda, BMW and other car makers recalled about 3.6 million vehicles last year to fix the airbag defect in different models. Honda alone has surpassed 6 million vehicles in recalls since 2008.
Jaguar Land Rover's air bag defect in the latest recall is not related to the exploding air bags. Owners of affected vehicles will be contacted by the dealers, starting August 30.
