Ford, Mazda Ask to Be Excluded in New Takata Recall

Ford and Mazda say they want to be excused from participating in an U.S. recall of certain Takata Corp. airbag inflators previously considered safe from misfiring, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The companies say they will petition the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to be exempted from the new campaign because they have found no defective inflators among their own affected vehicles. The agency has the option of rejecting the petitions and ordering recalls anyway.

Some 19 carmakers already are replacing or preparing to recall roughly 70 million Takata inflators in the U.S. The device use an ammonium nitrate propellant that can deteriorate over time, then explode when triggered in a crash. The devices have been blamed in at least a dozen fatalities in the U.S.

The inflators typically are in older vehicles and lack a drying agent that Takata later began to blend into the propellant to help stabilize it. But NHTSA also is recalling 2.7 million newer inflators that use a desiccant. Ford says most of the vehicles in that total are an assortment of its own cars and crossover vehicles made between 2006 and 2012.

NHTSA cites tests that suggest that the propellant in the newly recalled inflators is deteriorating and could eventually explode. But Ford says it has found no evidence of degradation, declaring that “there is no data to suggest a recall is needed.”