Takata Recall: A Meeting Between Automakers
Since the massive Takata safety defect came to light, things have been going downhill: the Japanese equipment manufacturer tried to deny, and then limit the recalls to an absolute minimum when the government asked them to repair their defective products.
The NHTSA then forced Takata to recall every single defective inflator they built, but they refused. We don’t yet know what the consequence of this response will be.
But what about the defective vehicles? Since the manufacturers have an image to maintain (and they have a lot to lose in this case), it seems that they are willing to work together to find a solution: delegates from Toyota, Honda, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Mazda, BMW, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Subaru met up in Detroit last week to try and find a solution.
Simply organizing a recall on such a massive scale is complicated: with more than 20 million affected vehicles, finding enough parts is pretty much impossible, and waiting for the factory to build enough would take too long…