Advancing safety, restoring trust: Other views

Shigehisa Takada, chairman and CEO of Takata Corp., in a statement: "This agreement with NHTSA ... presents a clear path forward to advancing safety and restoring the trust of automakers and the driving public. We have worked extensively with NHTSA and our automaker customers over the past year to collect and analyze a multitude of testing data in an effort to support actions that work for all parties and, most importantly, advance driver safety. We are committed to continuing to work closely with NHTSA and our automaker customers to do everything we can to advance the safety of drivers."

Edward Niedermeyer, Bloomberg View : "Though driving continues to get safer, it's still the most dangerous thing most Americans do every day, even when the industry isn't concealing and denying defects as long as it can get away with it. If individual automakers and suppliers lose credibility on safety, they risk losing sales to competitors, but if the whole industry loses the public's trust, it widens the opportunity for Silicon Valley companies to foment disruptions of the entire business. After all, Google is threatening to eliminate the single greatest source of road danger — the human driver — while automakers still struggle to live up to the regulations and consumer expectations that were supposed to end the bad old days of auto safety."

Micheline Maynard, Forbes : "Throughout the history of automotive recalls, the federal government has focused its efforts primarily on the car companies. It was their job, not that of the federal government, to make sure their vehicles were made from properly made parts. And, if those parts failed, it was the car company's responsibility to punish the supplier, either in lost business or a stern finger-pointing. That all changed on Tuesday. NHTSA reached a deal with Japan's Takata Corp. involving 33.8 million faulty air bag inflator mechanisms, (doubling) the number of vehicles that have been recalled. ... No big fine was announced, in part because the government is already fining Takata. But those figures could be miniscule compared with what Takata could face in lawsuits."