The agency is proposing the recall amid reports of injury and death

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants to recall 52 million air bag inflators after finding they could explode, sending shrapnel out and causing injuries. In the United States, the virus has already killed one person and infected seven others, and the agency says more could happen if the blowers are not recalled or replaced.

The air bag inflator is manufactured by ARC Automotive Inc. and Delphi Automotive Systems until January 2018, according to the agency. With the airbags still flaring up, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Defect Investigation Office in April 2023 asked ARC Automotive to begin the recall process.

But ARC Automotive argued that the agency lacked “sufficient evidence” of a safety defect and that the seven confirmed lacerations that caused the injuries were “incidental or isolated failures that are an inevitable part of any high-volume manufacturing operation.”