Articles Posted in Unsafe Products

Amid all the discussion surrounding this week’s government shutdown a lot of attention has been paid both to large budget issues and to the daily inconveniences – and, in some cases serious troubles – the suspension of government services involves for many Americans.

One of the most potentially hazardous areas of the shut down may prove to be consumer safety. As an article this week at Boston.com (the website of the Boston Globe) explains, as part of the broader shut down the Consumer Product Safety Commission “is only announcing recalls that pose an imminent risk to the public.”

As though to demonstrate what exactly that might mean, on Thursday the CPSC recalled “some 15 million surge protectors sold for a decade at some of the nation’s largest retailers… after more than 700 reports of the strips overheating.” It is, of course, very good to see the CPSC still at work, even in a much diminished form, but one also must ask whether this is the bar that product recalls must cross for as long as the current government funding crisis continues.

It would be fair to say that when renting a car most of us assume the car is safe. Car rental companies make you sign a document acknowledging any visible damage to the vehicle and are known to check returned vehicles carefully before sending them back out with new renters.

Did you know, however, that if the car or truck you’re renting is subject to a recall notice no law prevents a rental company from sending you out on the road in that vehicle? As a basic measure of consumer protection it sounds amazing, but, according to a recent article in the trade publication Automotive News, it is true.

Not only that, but major figures in the industry are fighting to retain their right to send customers out in unsafe vehicles. Automotive News reports that earlier this month “major automakers and auto dealers told a Senate panel… that they remain opposed to legislation that would prohibit rental car companies from renting or selling vehicles that are subject to a federal safety recall.” (car rental companies generally sell their vehicles after a year or two of use)

The really surprising thing about the BMW recall announced this week is not the fact that some older models in the German carmaker’s line had what USA Today describes as “potentially shrapnel-producing airbags.” Rather, it is that the recall has taken this long to be initiated granted everything else we know about the airbags in question. According to the newspaper, in the recalled vehicles “the passenger airbag could explode too forcefully and send metal or plastic shrapnel flying at the passenger.”

As the newspaper reported on Tuesday, BMW has recalled its 2002 and 2003 3-Series cars because of the airbag issue. The recall order is thought to effect about 42,000 vehicles here in the United States and 220,000 worldwide. According to USA Today the air bags and related assemblies for these vehicles “were supplied by Takata, which also supplied potentially shrapnel-producing passenger bags that forced Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda and General Motors to recall some 3.4 million vehicles worldwide last month.” This raises a basic question: if five other automakers using the same company’s products recalled them for this issue why did BMW – or any other manufacturer who may have used the air bags in question – wait at all to participate in the recall?

Even more troublingly, as the newspaper makes clear, this critical unsafe products issue has been on the auto industry’s radar screen for quite some time. According to USA Today, Takata air bags “were blamed for two deaths in Hondas in 2009.” Moreover, the paper reports: “Takata has had problems going back to the 1990s. It supplied faulty safety belts that triggered a recall of more than 9 million vehicles in the U.S. in 1995, a near-record at the time.”