Honda, Toyota, Hyundai Class Action Says Airbags Are Defective

A class action lawsuit claims that airbags present in some Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai vehicles fail to deploy because of a defect in their control unit.

The Toyota, Honda, Hyundai class action lawsuit was filed by James Carroll, Md Ullah, and Eldon Painter, who say that they purchased vehicles with defective airbag control units.

The car owners claim that the safety of their vehicles is important to them, and had they known that their vehicles had defective airbags, they would not have purchased them or would not have paid as much as they did.

The Honda class action states that the three drivers purchased their vehicles from authorized dealers. The plaintiffs say that their vehicles were subject to a recall, but they were not notified of this fact when they purchased their vehicles.

Allegedly, ZF-TRW, the manufacturer of the airbag control unit in some of these vehicles knew that it was defective as early as 2013, because vehicle manufacturers were notified of a number of collisions involving failed airbag systems.

However, the manufacturer reportedly did not issue warnings to drivers, nor did the car manufacturers.

The drivers say that the defect in the airbag control unit is caused because the unit is susceptible to electrical overstress, which can cause the airbags to not deploy in the event of a collision. Allegedly, the overstress is caused because the circuits of the units are not sufficiently protected.

The Toyota class action alleges that the car manufacturers’ response to the defects has been insufficient. They note that some makers have issued recalls, but some of the vehicles with the affected airbag control units were not recalled.

The drivers state that such was the case in Hyundai’s recall, which did not include the allegedly affected 2014-2019 Sonata and 2013-2019 Sonata Hybrid.

Additionally, the Hyundai class action states that in some cases, when car manufacturers issued recalls of allegedly affected vehicles, they did not repair all of them, or did not repair them quickly. The drivers claim that this financially injured drivers further and caused them inconvenience because they were not able to use their vehicles.

The airbag defect class action lawsuit says that the control unit manufacturers and the car manufacturers were aware that there was a problem with the airbag control unit but misrepresented the vehicles as safe. 

The drivers claim that the companies made a widespread practice of not notifying customers at the point of sale that the vehicles were defective.

The Hyundai, Toyota, Honda class action goes on to note that customers cannot reasonably discover the defect themselves, as they rely on representations by the company to determine if the vehicle is safe, reliable, and free from defects.

The customers claim that the company’s misrepresentations caused the drivers to be “deprived of their ability to make informed purchasing decisions.” Allegedly, this was done knowingly on the part of the companies in the interest of maximizing their profits from the sale of the vehicles.

Carroll, Ullah, and Painter are represented by Eric H. Gibbs, David Stein, and Jeffrey Kosbie of Gibbs Law Group LLP, and by W. Mark Lanier, Alex Brown and Richard Meadow of The Lanier Law Firm.

The Honda, Hyundai, Toyota Airbag Defect Class Action Lawsuit is James Carroll, et al. v. American Honda Motor Company Inc., et al., Case No. 8:19-cv-01155, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

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