CANBERRA, Oct. 12 (Xinhua) -- More than 90,000 Australians are still driving vehicles with airbags that have been blamed for serious injuries and deaths, it has been revealed.
Takata airbags have been implicated in 18 deaths worldwide, prompting the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to release eight recall notices for cars containing the airbags.
But in a statement issued on Wednesday night, Stephen Collins, director of Honda Australia, said tens of thousands of Honda owners have not had their airbags replaced.
"As of late last week, there are still 94,325 Honda vehicles in need of repair," Collins said.
"We are urging customers of vehicles who service outside the Honda network to have their vehicle repaired, free of charge, as soon as possible."
The update from Honda came after the ACCC in September issued a reminder to Australian motorists, urging them to check if their vehicle was subject to the recall.
"There have been serious injuries and deaths from faulty Takata airbags," the ACCC said.
"The inflator components may deteriorate and subsequently mis-deploy in an incident causing metal fragments to propel out of the airbag."
Collins said that the company had completed more than half a million inflator repairs so far and plans to issue another recall letter warning that "choosing not to act could be deadly."
"Unfortunately there are still some customers of affected vehicles who are simply not responding to repeated attempts by the company to contact them and have their airbag inflators replaced. We need to change this behaviour," he said.
In addition to Honda, the ACCC warned that BMW, Chrysler, Ferrari, Lexus, Mazda, Mercedes Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota had all sold vehicles fitted with the airbags in Australia.
