Honda under-reported 1,729 injury and death incidents

Honda failed to tell federal safety regulators of 1,729 accident claims or reports of deaths and injuries between July 2003 and June 2014, according to an audit by an outside law firm hired by the automaker.

"Our review to date indicates that these were inadvertent data entry and computer programming errors," said Rick Schostek, executive vice president of Honda North America, in a conference call today.

"Additionally, the audit found a delay between the time that Honda first became aware of possible discrepancies in its reporting and the full investigation and reporting of the issue."

Failure to report safety problems in a timely manner has become a huge concern in the wake of a series of recalls in recent years that have led to further investigation of automakers for their actions.

Honda hired the law firm of Bowman and Brooke, which in September began an audit of the automaker's system for reporting injuries and deaths involving its vehicles.

Monday was Honda's deadline to respond to a request from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about when it first learned of injuries or deaths from ruptured Takata air bag inflators. The inflators are at the center of NHTSA's recall of 7.8 million vehicles, including more than 5 million Honda vehicles from the 2001 through 2011 model years.

The exploding air bags are tied to at least five deaths in the U.S. and one in Malaysia. Last week Schostek and Takata executive Hiroshi Shimizu were grilled by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

Last week NHTSA safety agency called for Takata and 10 automakers using its air bags to expand the recall to all of the U.S. Currently, the recall is limited to Florida, most of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Puerto Rico because the majority of fatalities and injuries reported happened in regions of high humidity.

NHTSA and Takata have said the risk of inflators rupturing and spraying shrapnel into drivers and passengers rises when ammonium nitrate, the compound used to ignite the air bags, can explode when exposed to moisture.

Also Monday, the brother of a South Carolina woman, Mary Wolfe, sued Honda and Takata for wrongful death. Wolfe died shortly after a February 2008 accident in which her 2002 Accord veered off the road near her home and crashed into a culvert, a mail box and a tree. The suit alleges she died from injuries sustained when the air bag deployed with excessive force.

Honda did not notify Wolfe's family until November 2012 that her car was subject to a recall for the Takata air bags.

Honda also said in a prepared question-and-answer sheet that it first learned in 2011 of discrepancies between its reporting practices and what NHTSA expected, but didn't begin the audit until two months ago.

"Honda acknowledges it lacked the urgency needed to correct its problems on a timely basis," the Q&A stated. But it attributed most of the omissions or under-reporting to data entry and computer programming errors.

Takata faces a Dec. 1 deadline for a similar in-depth response to a NHTSA request. Specifically, the agency wants to know how many replacement air bag inflators it can produce and whether it has asked competing air bag suppliers to help produce enough to replace at least two air bags in at least 7.8 million vehicles.

In last week's Senate hearing, Takata's Shimizu said the company can make 300,000 new inflators per month now and is working to increase that to 450,000 by January.

Senators Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla., on Monday also asked Takata to provide documents similar to those NHTSA is seeking. Among their specific requests was a list of every death or injury Takata knows of that may have been caused by a rupturing air bag in a vehicle the company supplied.

Contact Greg Gardner at 313-222-8762 or ggardner@freepress.com.