For the past few years, major auto manufacturers such as Honda and Toyota have been facing major recall issues with models that date as far back to 2002. The issue at hand is with an airbag company that is named Takata that is contracted with the automakers to make and supply the airbags for their vehicles. It has just been reported that Honda suspects a fifth death to a driver that may have been killed due to the airbag issue. The airbags have been discovered to release correctly upon impact, however the problem found is that they can also release large pieces of metal into the drivers cabin as well, along with other pieces of matter. Chris Martin, a spokes person for Honda in the article that I read reported that Honda believes there has been 5 deaths as well as 52 injuries due to the malfunction of the Takata airbags. It has been reported yesterday that Honda as well as police are still investigating the death of a 35 year old male who was killed by a minor accident in his Honda Accord that caused the airbags to deploy.
This raises a major ethical dilemma as well as many questions. It has been reported that models as recent as 2010 were also reported to have the same problem and were also called in for recall. Did Honda not know about the issue for the past 8 years? That's hard to believe. This is obviously an ethical dilemma for Honda as the result of a wrong decision is human death and injury. The reported accident and death that is currently under investigation was called in by Honda for recall in 2011. Being that the vehicle was a 2002 model, thats an awful lot of time for a major corporation to detect such a problem. To make it worse, Honda stated themselves that they have no record of that particular vehicle coming in to fix the problem. This is a larger issue when considering that Honda could have potentially saved millions of dollars by ignoring the problem.
This ethical dilemma automatically reminded me of the Pinto scandal. This situation being different in that Ford must have been aware of the issue before the cars even left the factory, Honda has more leverage to protect their side of things as the issue is due to an item of the vehicle that they outsourced and might not have had access to the process. However, the problem may have also resulted from the improper installation of the airbags as well, which would have happened in Honda factories. In the case of the Ford Pinto it has been widely studied and deemed to be that Ford clearly used a utilitarian framework in their decision to pass on the millions of recalls and repairs and basically "deal with" the deaths and lawsuits; a calculated decision that proved they could cut their losses. They put together the cost benefit analysis equation together and unfortunately decided that the profits that they could hold on to were more valuable to THEM then the human lives that would have inevitably been lost. Did Honda do the same thing? That's still open for discussion. Is it a stretch to think so? Definitely not when considering the facts of this dilemma.
One can argue that even as large as company Honda is and despite their international presence, such an issue may be difficult to detect. After all, 5 deaths and 52 injuries is a very minute percentage of the vehicles produced. But even one human life or even one human injury that results from a malfunction raises a very considerable problem, or at least it should.
I don't believe that Honda has dealt with this ethical dilemma correctly, in that case all of the models that had any potential of harming human lives should have been recalled and repaired no matter what the cost to the company, as human life should be deemed as beyond value and profits. Again, everything is still under investigation when it comes to Honda's internal control and operations when it comes to this issue, I just don't think it looks too good from here.
Source: NBC News
URL: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/fifth-death-may-be-linked-recalled-air-bags-honda-says-n296421
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