Japan stepped up pressure on the airbag supplier Takata on Friday over safety problems that have been linked to at least five deaths outside the country and led to a Senate hearing in Washington.
In a break from Japanese regulators’ standard practice in dealing with automobile defects, the Transport Ministry said it had directly ordered Takata to carry out a thorough investigation and to provide the government with more information. The ministry normally deals directly only with automakers, not their suppliers.
Akihiro Ohta, the transportation minister, said the authorities were responding to the serious nature of the airbag problem, in which some Takata-made devices explode violently when they deploy, sending metal fragments shooting into the car’s cabin.
“This is an extremely important safety issue,” Mr. Ohta told reporters after a regular cabinet meeting.
Mr. Ohta also said the ministry had asked automakers to consider whether it was necessary to widen the scope of recalls in Japan, where about 2.3 million vehicles have been recalled over the issue so far, out of a worldwide total of more than 14 million.
While the ministry was not ordering additional recalls, he said its concerns had increased after federal safety regulators in the United States sought broader recalls on Tuesday.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the United States called on automakers to conduct a nationwide recall of vehicles that contain driver’s-side airbags made by Takata. That would expand a recall that has been mostly limited to two states and two territories associated with high humidity, conditions that are believed to increase the risk of airbag explosions.
Japan’s recalls have not been limited to specific parts of the country, but a fresh examination by automakers could look at more models. Most of the vehicles recalled so far were made in the early 2000s.
In Japan, an official at the transportation ministry department that oversees automobile recalls declined to say when the ministry began communicating directly with Takata, but confirmed that the move was “exceptional.”
“When there has been a need for speedy answers, we have gone to Takata directly,” the official, Masato Sahashi, said in a telephone interview. “It’s not something we normally do, but it happens in serious instances.”
The ministry usually leaves it to automakers to identify and deal with suppliers of defective parts themselves. Suppliers are not named in recall notices, though in some cases, the ministry makes public the number of accidents associated with a given component.
Four incidents of ruptured Takata airbags have been recorded in Japan so far, according to the ministry’s records, which are collected from automakers. None resulted in injuries. Of the five deaths reported worldwide, four have occurred in the United States and one in Malaysia.
On Thursday, a senior Takata executive testified during a Senate hearing that was called to examine the airbag problem. Hiroshi Shimizu, Takata’s senior vice president for global quality assurance, expressed sympathy for the victims but offered little new information. Asked if he supported expanding the recalls in the United States, he refused to clearly address the question.
“It is hard for me to answer yes or no,” he said. (the new york times)
