When the 2002 Honda Civic crashed into the back of another car in a Houston suburb, authorities said the impact was moderate, and that everyone should have “been able to walk away,” according to a sheriff’s deputy. Instead, the Honda’s 17-year-old driver bled to death.
The young woman likely would have survived, it turned out, had a defective airbag been replaced, something Honda claims it attempted to do, sending out six recall notices since the service action was first announced in 2011.
The incident, the latest of 11 deaths linked to defective Takata airbags, was by no means a rare incident. Safety experts say there have been a growing of crashes, injuries and fatalities in recent years involving vehicles with potentially life-threatening defects that haven’t been fixed, despite ongoing recalls. Vehicle tracking service CarFax claims more than 30 million such vehicles are on the road.
