Takata Airbags

Floor Speech

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Mr. NELSON. Madam President, we have had quite a running story about the maker of inflatable airbags, which are usually in the steering wheel of an automobile and also over on the passenger side. These airbags have saved countless lives. Yet what we have found is that a manufacturer named Takata from Japan has consistently had different airbags under recall. Well, we just found out yesterday that another one of the automobile manufacturers that uses Takata airbags has now had a further recall just yesterday with 2.2 million of their vehicles. Why? Because of defective airbags.

These bags are supposed to save lives, not harm and kill lives. Yet I remember the lady in Orlando who had a minor fender-bender collision in an intersection, and her air bag deployed. When the police got there, they thought there was a homicide. Her neck was lacerated, and she bled to death. There is a fireman, also near Orlando, who will never be a fireman again because he lost his right eye after the explosion of the air bag. The airbag is defectively manufactured and explodes with such force that the air bag becomes a hand grenade which explodes, and pieces of shrapnel fly into the face of the driver or the passenger.

In the case of the lady in Orlando, her jugular was slashed and she was killed. We have seen a score of these deaths around the country. There was recently another one from a defective Takata airbag in South Carolina. There are now well over 20 million vehicles that have been recalled.

I will be talking to the head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and will be asking all of these questions about safety, such as this: Why are we having the drip, drip, drip of recalls here and recalls there? Why isn't this agency taking an aggressive approach and going after all of these inflaters?

It is expected that it is the explosive compound ammonium nitrate that becomes extremely explosive when exposed to humidity and causes the metal to shred and, therefore, go right into the very driver or the passenger it was intended to save.

This is a matter of grave concern, and now the latest news is that Honda has recalled over 2 million more vehicles nationwide. There have been over 20 million vehicles that have been recalled worldwide. We have to get to the bottom of this and get those defective airbags out of the steering wheels of those cars and replace them with safe airbags.

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