Kate Hawkesby: Motorists' complacency and used car importers play a part in Takata airbag saga

For everybody asking what took the Government so long to order a recall on the Takata airbags - well why is it up to the government?

What about the car owners who haven't been bothered to do this of their own volition?
This recall was first issued in 2013 - that's five years ago.

At that time, and in the ensuing months and years, the car companies involved were writing to owners of the dodgy airbags, over and over again - sometimes up to five times.

And guess what a huge chunk of those owners did? Nothing.

Of the 320,000 cars affected, two-thirds of the owners were written to. A total of 134,000 took their vehicles in for the recall to be completed, but that meant more than 78,000 didn't bother. Almost 80,000 people didn't care, didn't bother, didn't follow it up. It's free. It costs you nothing, and still all those people didn't bother.

This created so much frustration for the Motor Industry Association, it appealed to the Government to find some way of requiring owners to get their cars fixed. So basically it had to seek some kind of compulsory rule, in order to make it happen, in order to redress the complacency of a large swathe of owners.

I realise it's not a simplistic issue, it's two-pronged, but the slack owner aspect of it, is not the Government's fault.

The second part of this issue, is the bit where the one-third of owners weren't notified, and didn't know about the recall - and that's the part where the Government could be more proactive and hands on long term. If they can help prevent this all becoming an issue in the first place, then that's genuinely useful.

Used imported vehicles coming into New Zealand are often not properly checked to see that recall notices have been raised in the country of source. It then becomes too easy for these cars to be onsold to unsuspecting New Zealand customers.
That smoke and mirrors approach is not good enough.

So a government measure which ensures import compliance, including satisfying the recall option, might also be helpful.
And isn't that the right place for it start? With the actual importers of these cars?

Luckily enough for us, there are no known cases in New Zealand of these airbags blowing up and injuring anyone - we haven't had deaths like in other parts of the world, but we have taken a giant risk.

We can't automatically blame the government for that though, and we can't keep turning to them to wipe our bums if we didn't bother responding to the original notice from the manufacturer in the first place.

What we can do is insist that future measures around car import compliance are tightened up to prevent this happening again.