There is a good chance you know someone driving one. About 1.7 million vehicles on South African roads are still fitted with defective Takata airbags, the kind of inflator that can rupture and fire metal fragments at the driver and front passenger. Now the country's carmakers are making a fresh, coordinated push to get them fixed.
A recall that stalled
Tshetlhe Litheko, chief policy officer at the automotive business council Naamsa, has confirmed a year-long, industry-funded campaign running from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. Its job is to reach the owners who never responded to earlier recalls. The scale of that gap is telling: the industry started with about 2.7 million affected vehicles but managed to reach fewer than half of the owners.
To close the distance, Naamsa is working with the Road Traffic Management Corporation and the National Consumer Commission, and has partnered with the Retail Motor Industry Organisation to carry out repairs in areas where carmakers have no dealership.
Free repairs, and maybe a reward
For owners, the important part is simple: the airbag replacement is free at authorised dealers. This time the industry is trying to make it easier to act on, with vehicle identification number checks to flag affected cars, major awareness drives over the December holidays, and community outreach. Naamsa is even weighing "rewards" as a magnet to coax reluctant owners of particular models and age groups to book their cars in. The immediate goal is to reach 300,000 of the outstanding 1.7 million vehicles during the campaign.
The danger is not theoretical. The Takata inflators were recalled worldwide from around 2013 after a series of deaths and injuries, when the devices exploded and sent metal shards into the cabin. A decade on, South Africa's challenge is no longer awareness among carmakers but tracing second- and third-hand owners who may have no idea what is sitting in their steering wheel. Whether a year and a basket of incentives is enough to close that gap is the test this campaign now has to pass.
