Honda airbag

It keeps coming. Honda has further recalled around 690,000 cars in the USA and Japan to replace air bag inflators made by Takata after the parts supplier finally agreed to follow US orders to expand some of its previous recalls. Japan's third-largest automaker disclosed the recall in filings in Washington (350k vehicles) and Tokyo (340k), Reuters reports.

Just earlier this month, Honda had expanded its Takata airbag recalls by nearly five million cars to about 20 million vehicles worldwide since 2008. The move came after Honda's own investigations found two new problems with inflators it had retrieved for sampling. The root cause of those defects is unknown.

That recall campaign included models such as the CR-V, Civic, Accord and Jazz, made between 2002 to 2008. Honda has said it will replace the driver-side inflators made by Takata with inflators made by Autoliv and Daicel, while the Takata inflators on the passenger-side will be swapped for ones from Daicel and Takata.

After months of resisting, Takata last week finally agreed with the USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to roughly double its US recalls to 34 million vehicles spanning 11 automakers, including more models and years of production. Its air bag inflators could deploy with too much force and spray metal fragments inside vehicles. Six deaths have been linked to the issue so far, all on Hondas.

On the local front, Honda Malaysia announced a "precautionary update" for 87,182 units on May 21. The models involved are the 2003-2008 Honda City, 2003-2008 Honda Civic, 2002-2007 Honda CR-V, 2004-2006 Honda Jazz and 2004-2005 Honda Stream.