Report: Takata employees raised red flags about air bags

Nathan Bomey | USA TODAY

Employees for auto supplier Takata warned the company years ago of data that could have raised concerns about air bags that are now blamed for at least eight deaths and a recall of 19 million vehicles, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The news organization reported that documents, which surfaced in litigation targeting Takata, "show employees’ beliefs that Takata concealed testing failures and provided erroneous data" to its customers.

The revelation comes after Honda, the company's biggest customer, had already said that Takata had "misrepresented and manipulated test data" on air bag inflators. Honda said it would not use the Japanese auto supplier's air bags in any future products, and several other automakers have made similar moves.

All of the known deaths so far attributable to Takata air bags occurred in Honda's vehicles.

Takata has already acknowledged "that it was aware of a defect but failed to issue a timely recall," the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement earlier this month. The company has apologized for its handling of the matter.

An American engineer for Takata, Bob Schubert, wrote in a January 2005 internal report that the company was “prettying up” data to meet compliance standards and that he felt obligated to say something, according to the Journal.

“It has come to my attention that the practice has gone beyond all reasonable bounds and now most likely constitutes fraud,” Schubert wrote, according to the Journal.

It’s unclear how that data affected design and manufacturing of Takata’s air bags.

Earlier this month, the company agreed to accept at least $70 million in fines from the NHTSA for failures involving the exploding air bags, which have killed at least eight people and injured at least 98.

The penalties could increase to $200 million if the supplier does not adequately comply with a plan to accelerate recalls of defective air bags and eliminate a chemical that may have caused the incidents. It's the largest civil penalty in NHTSA’s history.

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