The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will wait until around Thanksgiving to decide officially the next step in the massive Takata airbag inflator recall, agency boss Mark Rosekind (pictured above) indicated at a recent meeting. The regulator said was also contemplating whether to appoint a third party to begin supervising the entire campaign's progress, according to The Detroit News.
While beforehand the agency looked primed to announce an expansion to additional automakers, NHTSA actually used this meeting to outline the current state of recall repairs and research. The regulator didn't specifically address adding more vehicles or companies, according to The Detroit News. Instead, it said that testing is still under way to figure out a root cause of the parts' ruptures.
The latest evaluations indicate a combination of high-humidity and age as major risk factors in the ruptures, though. As the propellant gets older, the inflator begins to expand, and at a certain size the breaks become more prevalent. Takata is checking thousands of the returned, recalled parts each week and has found 450 eruptions in 115,000 tests.
After months of repairs, there're also still millions of vehicles on the road that need new inflators. According to NHTSA's latest tally, 30 percent of the recalled parts in high-humidity areas are now replaced, and 22.5 percent are fixed nationwide, according to The Detroit News. To quicken the process, the agency might compel automakers to order more replacements and prioritize them in the most danger-prone regions, like around the Gulf Coast.
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While beforehand the agency looked primed to announce an expansion to additional automakers, NHTSA actually used this meeting to outline the current state of recall repairs and research. The regulator didn't specifically address adding more vehicles or companies, according to The Detroit News. Instead, it said that testing is still under way to figure out a root cause of the parts' ruptures.
The latest evaluations indicate a combination of high-humidity and age as major risk factors in the ruptures, though. As the propellant gets older, the inflator begins to expand, and at a certain size the breaks become more prevalent. Takata is checking thousands of the returned, recalled parts each week and has found 450 eruptions in 115,000 tests.
After months of repairs, there're also still millions of vehicles on the road that need new inflators. According to NHTSA's latest tally, 30 percent of the recalled parts in high-humidity areas are now replaced, and 22.5 percent are fixed nationwide, according to The Detroit News. To quicken the process, the agency might compel automakers to order more replacements and prioritize them in the most danger-prone regions, like around the Gulf Coast.
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