Stop Driving Your '01-'03 Honda or Acura Immediately, Says NHTSA

From Road & Track

If you own a Honda or Acura built from 2001 to 2003, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is strongly recommending that you do not drive your vehicle. At all. According to NHTSA data, these vehicles could be equipped with a particularly defective subset of the already widely-recalled Takata airbags. And these airbags could pose up to a 50 percent chance of lethal rupture when deployed in an accident.

According to an urgent news release just published by NHTSA, owners of the following Honda and Acura models should not drive their vehicles under any circumstances:

• 2001-2002 Honda Civic

• 2001-2002 Honda Accord

• 2002-2003 Acura TL

• 2002 Honda CR-V

• 2002 Honda Odyssey

• 2003 Acura CL

• 2003 Honda Pilot

NHTSA says the airbag inflators installed in these vehicles "contain a manufacturing defect which greatly increases the potential for dangerous rupture." Laboratory testing by NHTSA shows rupture rates of up to 50 percent for these vehicles.

"Ruptures are far more likely in inflators in vehicles that spent significant periods of time in areas of high absolute humidity-particularly Florida, Texas and other parts of the Gulf Coast," NHTSA says. "By comparison, testing performed on similarly aged recalled Takata inflators that do not have the same manufacturing defect shows rupture rates at less than one percent."

Honda has already recalled the affected vehicles between 2008 and 2011, and the automaker claims that more than 70 percent of the affected vehicles have been suitably repaired. Still, these are some of Honda's best-selling vehicles of all time, and NHTSA estimates that more than 300,000 of the dangerously defective vehicles have not yet been repaired.

If you or someone you know owns a vehicle affected by this alert, visit SaferCar.gov immediately. There, you can type in the vehicle's VIN to see if it has been repaired under the relevant recall.

If your vehicle has not yet been repaired under the airbag recall, take it to your Honda dealer immediately for a no-cost repair.

Honda has had the most trouble stemming from the Takata airbag scandal, which is estimated to affect nearly 70 million cars worldwide. Airbags manufactured by Takata, a major supplier of safety equipment to most of the world's largest automakers, have been found to deploy too forcefully in crashes. When that happens, the airbag modules often tear themselves apart, shooting shrapnel into the passenger compartment.

So far, ten fatalities have been linked to this Takata airbag defect-eight of which occurred in examples of the above-mentioned Honda and Acura models. Recall efforts have been stymied by the discovery that Takata and Honda both allegedly knew about the issue and buried data indicating a potentially fatal problem with the airbags.