#TakataRecall

The Takata airbag recall was the largest in the automotive industry. So large, in fact, that we don’t actually know how many defective units are still floating around out there.

With the recall encompassing over 100 million airbag inflators sold around the world with the potential to kill occupants with shrapnel, keeping tabs was always going to be difficult. But Blomberg is reporting that it’s effectively impossible to account for all of them, noting that there are parts of the planet where the affected customers weren’t ever notified. We still haven’t even managed to fix all the units we knew were shipped in the United States, with at least 14 million potentially deadly inflators still presumed to be on the road as of July.

It’s an eventuality of car ownership. The odometer rolls around to a certain figure, a special orange light on the dash tells you there is an issue, or you hear a pow bang from somewhere underneath your automobile. Often, one or more of these is accompanied by a feeling of dread.

Today we talk horror stories from the often unpleasant experience everyone has in common: taking a car in for repairs.