The airbag maker Takata on Friday settled a closely watched lawsuit involving the injury and eventual death of a woman whose car crashed in 2014.
The settlement was announced moments before a critical hearing in which a judge in Jacksonville, Fla., could have ordered the company’s chief executive, Shigehisa Takada, to testify in the case.
Even the lawyer representing the family of the victim, Patricia Mincey, said the sudden turn of events was unexpected.
“I had no expectations at all” of a settlement, said the lawyer, Theodore J. Leopold, of the plaintiffs’ law firm Cohen Milstein in Washington. “We were preparing to go to trial.”
But Takata, whose airbags have been linked to at least 14 other deaths and more than 100 injuries, has been keen to keep Mr. Takada, a grandson of the company’s founder, out of the spotlight and away from depositions.
Takata’s airbags can rupture when they deploy in a crash, shooting metal fragments toward the driver or passengers. The defect has prompted 14 automakers to recall more than 60 million vehicles in the United States and millions more overseas.
Ms. Mincey was paralyzed from the neck down after the Takata airbag in her 2001 Honda Civic forcefully inflated after a collision on June 15, 2014. The airbag was among those recalled by Honda less than a week later.
Ms. Mincey alleged in her lawsuit, filed the following year, that Takata had knowingly designed and manufactured airbags that were defective and dangerous. She died in April at the age of 77 from complications from her quadriplegia.
“The matter has been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties,” Robert Rendine, a Takata spokesman, said on Friday.
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