NHTSA Extends BMW's Deadline for Takata Airbag Replacements
CARS.COM — Federal safety officials have granted BMW an additional five months to acquire replacement airbags needed to fix recalled vehicles equipped with potentially defective airbags manufactured by Japan’s Takata Corp. BMW now has until Aug. 31 to find a suitable supplier after informing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it could not meet its March 31 deadline.
Related: Is Your Car Part of the Takata Airbag Recall?
NHTSA gave BMW the original deadline on Nov. 3 as part of its Coordinated Remedy Order, which has now been amended with the extension. BMW told safety authorities that the supplier it had lined up to provide replacement driver-side airbag inflators fell through after failures during testing of the new devices.
“NHTSA’s priority continues to be ensuring that unsafe airbag inflators are replaced with safe ones,” NHTSA said in a statement Thursday.
Among the 24 million affected vehicles from a dozen automakers, the Takata recall involves hundreds of thousands of individual BMW vehicles and 42 different models. Affected models include variants of the 1 Series, 3 Series and 5 Series cars, as well as X1, X3, X5 and X6 SUVs. Specific models under recall can be found here.
The massive ongoing Takata recall began in 2014, when it was discovered that Takata-made driver-side airbag inflators could rupture upon deployment, propelling shrapnel and possibly causing serious injury or death to vehicle occupants. Nine U.S. deaths have been attributed to the faulty airbags.
