It’s spelled Takata, but for car manufacturers and many of their customers it reads “problems”. The latest in the series concerns Citroën, the French brand of the Stellantis family, a company owned by Exor which controls Republic through the publisher Gedi.
The car manufacturer is affected by a massive recall in Europe, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers, who are asked not to use the car unless something is done about it. The recall specifically affects a total of 605,772 vehicles Citroën C3 (the brand’s best-selling model, ahead of the 2CV) e DS3sold between 2009 and 2019 in around twenty countries in Southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.
This story, however, dates back to 2014. For a decade, essentially, we have been talking about this airbag. Moment in which, following some serious accidents, confirmation arrived in the USA that what made the safety device dangerous was the deterioration of a gas inside it.
Since then, tens of millions of cars from many brands have been recalled for airbag replacement, with a final recall announced Thursday by Nissan.
To get an idea of the phenomenon, suffice it to say that at the beginning of April, 45 million defective Takata airbags had been replaced in the USA, 68% of the affected parts in the country: 6 million remained to be replaced. The danger of Takata airbags – which also led to the bankruptcy of the Japanese manufacturer and the recall of millions of cars – affected brands including Honda, Toyota, Chrysler, Ford and BMW.
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Honda, the manufacturer’s main customer, carried out a recall in 2008, but the issue only came to light in 2014, when the US Highway Safety Agency (NHTSA) took up the case after a series of accidents. According to the American body, 27 deaths and at least 400 injuries in the USA have so far been officially attributed to faulty Takata airbags.
Following several fatal accidents involving the C3, criminal investigations were also opened in Guadeloupe and Guyana for ‘manslaughter’, according to local prosecutors. According to the Tokyo Shoko research institute, around 100 million airbags were affected worldwide.
When Takata filed for bankruptcy in 2017left more than 1,000 billion yen (8 billion euros) in debt, scoring the most sensational failure of an industrial company in the history of post-war Japan.
Having become one of the world’s leading groups in the airbag and seat belt market, of which it held a 20% share before the scandal, in 2017 Takata still had around 46,000 employees and 56 factories in 20 countries.
In the 2000s, the Japanese automotive supplier began using a new chemical agent, ammonium nitrate, in its airbags. But without a drying agent, it is unable to absorb moisture, which can lead, over time and in extreme weather conditions, to its deterioration and dangerous explosions, with fragments projected onto the driver or passenger. Takata is accused of having long tried to hide the problem, putting their profits before the safety of motorists. Aside from repeated apologies, the company was very stingy with explanations, initially denying any responsibility, which helped amplify the recall campaign and further tarnish the company’s reputation.
In Europe it seemed that the market was sheltered, but – as Citroën director Thierry Koskas said, quoted by AFP and on the BFM Business channel – the situation changed with “first accidents” in 2023.
As for the latest Citroën case, the Consumer Federation – who complains about a late intervention to protect motorists – observes that “the chemical substances contained in these devices could deteriorate over time, exposing the driver and passenger to the risk of the airbag inflator breaking with excessive force in the event of an accident, capable of causing serious injury or death.”
