U.S. authorities have now scheduled an Oct. 5 public hearing on the issue, a necessary step before seeking a court-ordered recall that could cover 52 million driver and passenger air bag inflators, or at least 25 million of the 284 million vehicles on U.S. roads.
Meant to safely inflate airbags, the devices can be found in vehicles from at least a dozen automakers. According to U.S. authorities, known incidents have involved models like the 2002 Chrysler Town and Country, 2004 Kia Optima, 2009 Hyundai Elantra, 2010 Chevrolet Malibu, 2015 Volkswagen Golf, 2016 Audi A3, and the 2015 and 2017 Chevrolet Traverse. The potentially unsafe inflators were all manufactured before January 2018.
"ARC believes they resulted from random ‘one-off’ manufacturing anomalies that were properly addressed by vehicle manufacturers through lot-specific recalls," a previous letter from the company to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stated. Transport Canada has published an extensive list of vehicles with driver-side ARC airbag inflators, which includes 1998 to 2017 models from major brands like BMW, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Fiat, Ford, Mercury, Lincoln, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Hummer, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Hyundai and Kia. These represent more than one in 10 registered vehicles.