Spending a year out of the public eye since Takata’s airbag crisis exploded, president Shigehisa Takada publicly apologized for the situation Thursday.
Following the supplier’s annual shareholders meeting — where he made his last public appearance a year earlier — Takada bowed and apologized at a public conference over the eight fatalities and the hundreds of injuries caused by his company’s airbags over the past decade, Automotive News writes:
I apologize for not having been able to communicate directly earlier, and also apologize for people who died or were injured. I feel sorry our products hurt customers, despite the fact that we are a supplier of safety products.
Takada says his company is looking over ways to help those affected by the airbags, including the establishment of a compensation fund.
Meanwhile, shareholders took him to task for disappearing from the public eye instead of facing the music, the slow progress on the investigation into the root cause behind the catastrophic failures of Takata’s airbags, and the lack of dividends.
Regarding the last point, Takada says he hoped dividend payments would resume “as soon as possible” once the crisis was resolved, adding he intends to see through to the end as its president. He declined to speculate as to when the end of the crisis would come, stating “the analysis isn’t progressing very well” as far as the investigation goes.
The apology comes after FCA cut ties with Takata, bringing aboard rival TRW Automotive to supply the 4 million modules needed to replace the defect airbags. The decision was made on the basis Takata would continue to use ammonium nitrate in its airbags — the same chemical linked to the catastrophic failures — whereas TRW uses a safer chemical propellant in its units.