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Most Unlucky Car Owner Buys A Salvage-Titled Car, Takata Airbags Injure Him

Honda investigated a crash involving a recalled 2002 Accord that had its driver injured by the airbags.
2002 Honda Accord 1 photo
Photo: Honda
The automaker treated the case with the utmost attention, as this situation should not have happened. Fortunately, we have a timeline of what that vehicle went through, and it is now clear, for the most part, why its airbag injured the driver.

The crash that we are referring took place in Las Vegas on March 3, 2017. The unnamed driver of the vehicle suffered from a punctured trachea, but doctors say that he is expected to live. While the injury could have taken his life, the driver was lucky just enough not to die or lose a limb.

It has been determined that the Takata inflator of the airbag in that car was produced in 2001. The NHTSA has concluded that those units, built from 2001 to 2003, have a rupture rate as high as 50%.

As Automotive News reports, those modules are called “Alpha,” and they are responsible for eight of ten deaths in the USA in the Takata scandal.

Five years ago, that vehicle was recalled, and it was fixed again in January 2015, both times at Honda dealerships. These two fixes are the reason why the automaker took so much trouble to investigate the matter.

Apparently, the vehicle got into a crash within months of the second time it got fixed during a recall. The car was totaled, but it did not end up in the junkyard. Instead, someone sold it as a salvage title.

Company specialists checked the airbag inflator that was installed on the crashed car and found that it was using a part from a 2001 Accord. The representatives of the company think that the defective inflator came from a salvage yard, which did not respect the law and sold a potentially defective part for use in a repair.

Honda has bought over 60,000 inflators from salvage resellers just to be sure that nobody installs them in cars. However, the automaker is still trying to find out how many defective airbags are still installed in vehicles that are on the road, as 275,00 units remain unfixed.

The majority of those are no longer driven, but it is unclear how many of them are used with potentially faulty airbags from Takata.
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About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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