Takata is facing civil fines of $14,000 per day for its alleged refusal to cooperate with a federal investigation over its shrapnel-shooting airbag inflators that have killed six and injured dozens more.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said today that Takata had not complied with two special orders it sent to the Japanese supplier in October and November that requested full explanations of its “deluge of documents.” So far, Takata has sent NHTSA more than 2.4 million documents relating to its airbag inflators, but the agency has little idea what they actually mean, according to the filing. Takata and NHTSA lawyers met twice in December and earlier this month, which was “unproductive and a waste of agency time and resources.” At that time in November, NHTSA had ordered Takata to recall all driver’s-side airbags nationwide. In later Congressional testimony, Takata said it did not find evidence to support such a recall, yet it still admitted that it did not know the root cause of the defect. Since then, Ford, Honda, and Mazda have made their driver’s-side airbag recalls national.
NHTSA said it would begin serving deposition notices to Takata employees in the U.S. and Japan if Takata continues to ignore the special order. Separately, federal attorneys in the Southern District of New York—the same district that is investigating GM’s faulty ignition switches and which won a $1.2 billion settlement from Toyota for unintended acceleration—have sent Takata subpoenas for documents, which suggests Takata may face a full-blown criminal case. The company is leading its own internal audit headed by former transportation secretary Samuel Skinner and has said it would make the results public. Meanwhile, automakers including Toyota, Honda, and Mazda are conducting third-party testing on the recalled inflators to determine the problem, which has not been clear since the first Takata recalls began on Honda vehicles in 2008.
- Massive Takata Airbag Recall: Everything You Need to Know
- Takata Engineer Who Warned of “Catastrophic Failures” Willing to Testify
- Ford Joins Honda, Mazda in Expanding Takata Airbag Recall to All 50 States
The $14,000 daily fine amounts to two separate $7000 fines, the maximum amount allowed under Department of Transportation regulations. Secretary Anthony Foxx is continuing to pressure Congress to pass the Grow America Act, an all-encompassing transportation bill that would increase daily fines to $25,000 and raise the maximum $35 million to $300 million. The bill, which hasn’t been acted upon since moving to a House committee in July, would also triple NHTSA’s defects-investigation budget to $31.3 million. Another six bills proposed by various legislators would attempt to do the same.
Clifford Atiyeh is a reporter and photographer for Car and Driver, specializing in business, government, and litigation news. He is president of the New England Motor Press Association and committed to saving both manuals and old Volvos.
