300,000 Dangerous Honda Airbag Inflators Not Yet Fixed

About 300,000 U.S. owners of older-model Honda and Acura cars have not yet responded to recalls urging them to replace Takata Corp. airbag inflators that have as much as a 50% chance of exploding in a crash.

Regulators have ordered more than a dozen carmakers to recall about 69 million vehicles in the American market. In June they identified 313,000 units made by Honda with especially high chances of misfiring and injuring or killing a vehicle's occupants. Only 13,000 of those cars have been fixed to date, the Associated Press reports.

Honda has been using multiple channels, including personal visits to owners’ homes, to notify customers of the danger. But most of the targeted cars have been sold two or three times, making it more difficult to track down current owners.

AP notes that at least one U.S. senator is urging Honda to do more. Safety officials have suggested one effective way to round up unrepaired recall vehicles would be to link their annual registration renewals to a nationwide recall database. But so far little has been done to implement such a plan.