Takata Airbag Linked To Another U.S. Death

(RTTNews) - Regulators have confirmed the eleventh U.S. fatality linked to Takata Corp.'s (TKTDF.PK) defective air bag inflators.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA said Thursday that a crash fatality in Riverside County, California, was tied to the rupture of a recalled Takata air bag inflator.

The victim, a 50-year-old woman, died after sustaining injuries in a crash on September 30. NHTSA investigators have inspected the vehicle, in cooperation with local authorities.

The victim was driving a 2001 Honda Civic. However, the NHTSA did not release the woman's name.

According to the agency, while the vehicle was first recalled in 2008, records have shown that the recall repair was never completed. The vehicle is included in a population of Honda and Acura vehicles that has been identified by the NHTSA as holding "substantially higher risk."

The air bag inflators in these particular vehicles contain a manufacturing defect which greatly increases the potential for dangerous rupture when a crash causes the air bag to deploy.

Malfunctioning Takata air bag inflators can explode with too much force, sending shrapnel into vehicles. The issue has now been linked to sixteen deaths worldwide, including five in Malaysia, and to more than 100 injuries in the U.S.

Ruptures are far more likely in inflators in vehicles that have spent significant periods of time in areas of high absolute humidity - particularly Florida, Texas, other parts of the Gulf Coast, and Southern California.

Testing of the inflators from these vehicles have shown rupture rates to be as high as 50 percent in a laboratory setting.

The NHTSA, in June, advised owners of about 313,000 recalled Honda and Acura vehicles to replace their Takata-made air bags immediately after testing showed there is as high as a 50 percent chance of rupture in a crash.

Nine of the eleven U.S. deaths caused by Takata air bags - where the inflator breaks apart and sprays metal and plastic shards at vehicle occupants - have now occurred in these models.

Nearly 70 million Takata air bag inflators are or will be under recall by 2019, in the largest and most complex auto safety recall in U.S. history.