Automotive Related Litigation

As most of you reading this know, our law firm since its inception, has been heavily involved in automotive-related litigation.  We’ve done major truck and car crash cases.  We have litigated product liability cases involving rollovers, roof collapses, defective seatbacks, defective seatbelts, defective glass and tires.  We have investigated failures of airbags as well.  

In recent developments, the Takata airbag has been under serious attack.  There have been claims made that Takata has kept defects about its airbags hidden well before the company issued a vast number of recalls starting in 2008.  The problem with the Takata airbag is that a flaw in the bag can cause the airbag to explode while it’s inflating.  Unfortunately, the information concerning these exploding airbags has not come to public light in spite of the fact that U.S. Senators have accused Takata of instructing employees to destroy information about the faulty airbags—including video and computer data.

One of the more serious problems of these bad airbags is that the defective airbag can cause metal pieces to pierce the steering column during airbag deployment because of the chemical reaction that occurs combined with high surrounding humidity levels.  Honda, who is one of the users of the Takata airbag, is the same company that admitted this past fall to failing to report almost 1,800 deaths and injuries to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since 2003.  Under U.S. law, carmakers are supposed to provide early warning reports accounting for each death or injury linked to possible safety defects.  In spite of the fact that they under-reported over 1,800 injuries and deaths, including Takata airbag inflator explosions.

Finally, at the end of November of last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered Takata to increase and enlarge its recall of the defective airbags throughout the country.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that various components of the Takata airbag can fail in all regions of the country.  Unfortunately, the Takata airbag is not only provided in the Japanese automobiles but also in automobiles manufactured by the Chrysler Group, Toyota and BMW which include this airbag.

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