Originally Posted By: antiqueshell
In any case I say if you have a ANY vehicle that is MORE than
10 years old, with airbags, have them disabled and deactivated.
Most manufacturers state that you cannot count on airbags older than a decade to reliably perform.
Super bad advice. Do not do this.
This is what the airbag industry is worried about, that the American consumer will carelessly group together all airbags as being dangerous, just because Takata has shipped bad airbags.
Your claim, that airbags older than 10 years do not perform reliably, is bad information. This is the sort of thing that results in very poor decisions, and could make the difference between a life being saved by an airbag, and not. I sure hope most have the reasoning skills of their own, to research reliable information before they follow bad advice like this.
Part of the reason that the recalls keep expanding, is because Takata has not been able to identify bookends to the process problems that they had. While I am not saying this is necessarily true, it is possible that the number of affected cars are much, much smaller than what is being recalled. But, if Takata can never put bookends on the issue, there may be a lot of cars that have to have new airbags installed.
Meanwhile, there are tens of millions of reliable, safe airbag systems in cars throughout the world. Takata is #3 in airbag and seat belt production. It's been a while since I have seen the numbers, but I believe they have well below 20% of the world market. (The two world leaders in the industry each command 40%, give or take a little, of the market. That doesn't leave a lot for the other players.)
There is no doubt, if I owned a car that was on the list, I would have it in the dealership tomorrow having the airbag disabled. But it would be so foolish to turn off an airbag that is not on the list. Don't condemn all airbags (and yourself to increased risk) because of Takata's mistakes.